Green Design » Worldchanging Retro

Worldchanging Retrospective: Finale

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:18:23 +0000

Five years ago, on October 1, we launched Worldchanging as a venue to find, discuss and imagine the world's most innovative solutions to the planet's most pressing problems. Since then, we've found a great and diverse global community of readers, won prizes and awards, put out a best-selling book, and published 8,500 stories about how to change the world. In the process we've not only grown substantially (becoming the second largest sustainability site on the web, according to Nielsen online) but gathered an amazing network of allies who are among the world's leading sustainability thinkers.

On October 1 of this year, we'll be announcing our next major project. We're incredibly excited to be taking the editorial work we've developed over these last five years to the next level, and we hope that all of you will join us in trying to make that work as useful and innovative as possible. On that, more to come.

In the meantime, we thought we'd use September as an opportunity to review what we've done so far -- a sort of Worldchanging greatest hits. All this month, we'll be highlighting the tools, models and ideas for building a bright green future that have inspired us so far.

Here are a few of our favorites from the beginning:

Zero Impact Within Our Lifetimes

Climate Change is a Problem We Can Choose to Tackle

Seeing Chinook as Indicators

Green Building, Compact Communities

Cool Hybrids, Smart Grids and Renewable Energy

Solastalgia and the Mental Affects of Climate Change

Moving From Rhetoric to Reality: Clean, Green Jobs

Optimism is a Political Act

Worldchanging Interview: Influential Thinker Clay Shirky

Combining Smart Grids and Product Service Systems

This piece is a part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 10:18 AM)

Combining Smart Grids and Product Service Systems

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:10:03 +0000

This article was written by Joy Green in March 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

What happens when disruptive ideas combine?

We’ve heard a lot about distributed energy generation and smart grids recently – cities could act as distributed power plants, channeling energy from hundreds of thousands, even millions of individual rooftops (think micro-wind and solar PV) into common use and minimizing transmission losses. In essence - your home or building generates clean power and sells the surplus to the grid at peak prices for you during the day– it buys any excess energy you need during the evening when prices are low. You could plug your hybrid car into this fabulous integrated system and depending on the time of day it would either sell surplus energy from its battery to the grid or charge itself up ready for use the next morning.

We’ve also heard a lot about product-service systems. At the moment, as I’m working on an urban mobility futures project at Forum For The Future , I’m particularly interested in the Velib scheme in Paris – the self-service, easy access bike hire scheme with banks of bikes outside metro stations and other key points that has got thousands of Parisians cycling again (Similar to Barcelona's Bicing system - ed.). You pick up a bike anywhere you need it and drop it off, no-fuss, at your destination. Like the smart grid, this is also a form of distributed infrastructure – you could call it a lightweight public transport infrastructure that smooths the peaks of demand for the more traditional system of the metro and the bus.

And if you combine them?

MIT recently outlined a service model for personal urban mobility that does just that.

Imagine the Velib bike scheme in Paris supplemented with self-service electric, stackable two-seater mini-cars at transport interchanges and hundreds of other points all over the city. These mini-cars are designed for multiple short urban trips so they don’t need huge bulky batteries or high top speeds. They’re tiny (six stack in the same space you’d park a regular car), lightweight, ultra-maneuverable and super-convenient – you’d never have to worry about finding a parking space again. You just swipe your card, pick up a mini-car whenever you need one from a nearby stack, and drop it off at another stack when you are done.

This already sounds like a good service model, but what makes it much more interesting are the potential second and third order effects. When the cars stack together, they effectively become large, intelligent batteries plugged into the grid – and the perfect partners for smart grids and distributed power generation. Car stacks could mop up and store excess energy or provide an extra boost of local power as required, so would be a particularly good fit with buildings that generate power from intermittent renewables such as solar or wind (or even, by the coast, wave power). In essence, each mini-car doubles as a mobility service and an intelligent energy storage device. With a hundred or so mini-cars in a stack, and hundreds or thousands of these car stacks in a city, you’d have enormous battery capacity being added to the electrical grid – perfect for large-scale distributed energy generation from renewables on buildings. The batteries would provide the flexibility to cope well with fluctuations in demand and generation.

If you then add in ubiquitous mobile networking and ‘embedded intelligence,’ things get even more interesting. William J Mitchell at MIT speculates on these mini-cars

* knowing patterns of energy prices and mobility demand, and intelligently playing the energy futures market
* operating in an environment of fine-grained, highly dynamic road congestion pricing, and intelligently playing in the road space market
* knowing parking space availability and dynamically adjusted prices, and intelligently playing in the parking space market

In effect, these cars becoming “Google for the city, efficiently getting you to its resources, while taking account of time and cost constraints”

Even without this heady third stage though, the proposal is a potential distributed system that integrates energy, transport and the built environment. It’s an idea for personal urban mobility that takes on many of the perceived strengths of the car – convenience, independence, weather protection and safety. (One caveat here though - it would be difficult to predict how many car journeys this system would actually displace without running a pilot project. Velib has so far mostly displaced public transport journeys – which is also helpful for easing pressure on creaking infrastructure – but had little effect on car use.)

It’s also a little closer to how an ecosystem works – flexible, interlinked and resilient. And this is a lot closer to how we’re going to have to think and act if we’re going to solve problems like personal mobility in a world where there are 9 billion of us and 6 billion of us live in cities.

Smart Grid, Meet the Product-Service Model is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 10:10 AM)

Worldchanging Interview: Influential Thinker Clay Shirky

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:03:22 +0000

This article was written by Jon Lebkowsky in March 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Clay Shirky is an influential writer, consultant, and teacher focused on the Internet as a social platform. He's one of the smartest thinkers I know about how people live, love, and work online. His new book, Here Comes Everybody:The Power of Organizing without Organizations, was just published by The Penguin Press. As an intro to Chapter 11, on "Promise, Tool, and Bargain," he says "There is not recipe for the successful use of social tools. Instead, every working system is a mix of social and technological factors." Clay and I had the following conversation early in March. We'll follow up with an asynchronous conversation on the WELL for two weeks starting May 28.

Jon Lebkowsky: My first very general question for you is about how the web started changing around 2000. What are your thoughts about what was driving the changes, and how the changes have affected our experience of the web?

Clay Shirky: This is the sort of ancient history that got me doing the book. Here Comes Everybody is, in a way, a do-over. I wrote an earlier book – a very different kind of book, about online community – and I had the grave misfortune to have it come out in April of 1995. The book was all about Usenet, the WELL, Echo, and it was about all of the social components of the pre-web Internet. And in April of '95, no one wanted to hear about that stuff anymore.

In fact, I got pulled into the web, too. I taught myself HTML, like a lot of people. I ended up being Production Manager of one web shop, and Chief Technology Officer of another. In that period, '95 to 2000, the template for the social use of the web was really under-optimized. Everybody was excited about using it to distribute information, and everybody was excited about ecommerce. We were basically recapitulating these older patterns: point to point transactions, replicating newspapers, magazines and so forth on the web.

I think that the change that started in 2000 came about for a couple of reasons. One – HotMail brought us all to the realization that the web could be a new interface for existing social platforms. It wasn't like email was one thing, and the web was the other. The web, in fact, was a general purpose interface.

The second thing is so many people were online by 2000, that you could actually start to get real social density, you didn't have to do everything just point to point.

And third, critically: the money ran out. Instead of entrepreneurs saying "I'm going to start this new little web service, and I'm going to go raise $5 million in venture capital, and I'm going to have this big business plan," people had to to ask themselves, "What's a cheap way to do this? What's a cheap way to accomplish my goal?" And, very often, the cheap way was to get the users involved. And once we started down that path, the possibilities just opened up.

Jon Lebkowsky: It was interesting to me that people didn't just throw up their hands and walk away, when there really was no money flowing. People who wanted to innovate, and who wanted to publish content online, all hung in, and were finding ways to do it. They were passionate about it.

Clay Shirky: Absolutely. And certainly a lot of people who rushed in in the late 90s, when it looked like there was free money, rushed back out again. But the people who were left cared enough about some other goal than being dotcom millionaires that they stuck with it. And very often the goals that were left, when the people who were seeking a quick buck were gone, were goals that had real social ramifications. These were people who wanted to make the world better in some way or other, rather than just figuring out a cheaper way to deliver plane tickets.

Jon Lebkowsky: You mention how much higher adoption was by 2000, and of course we've seen it increase persistently since then, so that pretty much everybody's online now. How does that change things, having this pervasive adoption of the web?

Clay Shirky: This is actually one of the things that first led me to try to describe the social patterns that ultimately ended up in this book.

There's a big difference between having some people online and having most people onine. That's a difference that appeals mainly to businesses, now the audience is larger. But there's another difference between having most people online and having everybody online. The advantage of having everybody online is that in your social group, if everybody is online, then you can take it for granted that you can use online tools to coordinate the life of that group.

Small social groups have very high density. In a group of five or six people, pretty much everybody has an interface to everybody else. That's a lot of interface. If even a couple of those interfaces can't be bridged by email or instant messaging, then people will default to the most inclusive possible technology, which prior to the Internet was the phone.

If you were under 35 in the year 2000, and you made more than $35,000 a year, you were almost certainly online and so were your friends, and you could start to take it for granted that you could use the Internet to coordinate your business life and your social life. You could use it to coordinate visits to church, group buying pools, anything that involved a group. Suddenly it became possible, and not because the technology was in place; the technology had been in place for years. It was because the social density had finally caught up with the technology.

Jon Lebkowsky: With Metcalfe's Law and Reed's Law, you're really talking about an increase in potential value that can be realized as real value every day.

Clay Shirky: And the funny thing about the relationship between social applications and Metcalfe and Reed's Laws is that social applications actually trailed them early on, because people don't want to adopt technologies that cut out some members of the group. Why would you use something that excludes some members of the group? But once social density kicks in, social applications actually overperform Metcalfe's Law, as predicted by Reed's Law, because the Internet isn't just about point to point connections, the way Metcalfe's Law is. It's also about group connections.

There was a famous example of this in the attempt to put MetroCards – to put digital card readers – in the New York City subway system. There was a very grim interim report from the Department of Transit, because they were using the token system and the MetroCard system at the same time, saying we've wired 80% of the stations, but we're not seeing 80% of the users use MetroCards. "Oh woe is me, woe is me, this whole thing is potentially a disaster."

And then you read on a little farther, and you realize they hadn't put the MetroCard Readers in Times Square or Union Square yet, which are two of the busiest subway stations. So as long as anybody had to use a token in any station, they weren't going to switch to the MetroCard. Social applications work exactly like that. Merely getting 80% of the people in your business on email meant that there were still significant conversations that you couldn't have online. And so people wouldn't make the switch.

Jon Lebkowsky: Well, sure. If you have a key member of your team or your group who just can't or won't adopt, just can't get it, it just can't work. You see this a lot with wiki. People want to use wiki for collaboration, but out of a dozen people in their group, three people are just totally wiki-resistant, just don't get it.

Clay Shirky: That's exactly right. And you bring up another important point. It's not just the availability of the technology, it's the mental availability of the user. If you've got the web, you can get access to a wiki, but if you've decided you are, as you say, wiki-resistant, it doesn't matter. This is one of the many reasons that groups of young people overperform groups of older people, even given the same technology. In addition to access to the tools, just the set of the functions that go into doing the job – it's more present among people who are more familiar with the tools.

Jon Lebkowsky: You talk quite a bit about public vs private, and the way we're using the web for everything – we all have the same tools to publish in a fairly sophisticated way and we're publishing in public, but not everybody is publishing with the same intention.

Clay Shirky: This is really a reply to all of those media outlets who are writing disparagingly about user-generated content, saying that the content of a weblog is dreck that no one would bother to publish in the print world. All of which is true, but irrelevant, because, of course, the people who are publishing the little observations about their trip to the mall in LiveJournal – they're not talking to you.

The really big change here is that we've got a medium which scales from small groups – me talking to a group of my friends – all the way to "now I am making a public declaration." And because previously, we had a world where, if somebody said "I love you" on the phone, you knew it was meant for you. And if somebody said "I love you" on the TV, you knew it was specifically not meant for you, because the mode of carriage lets us figure out how that message should be interpreted.

And that's now broken. There are people having relatively personal conversations with their friends, yet they're doing it in a public medium. But that's no different from sitting around talking with friends in the food court at the mall. If you want to go down and find a group of teenagers chatting to each other at the mall, you can sit at the next table over and listen in, but then it's pretty clear in that situation that you're the weird one.

What we don't yet have is a set of social norms for figuring out – in a medium like the web, which scales from intimate personal address all the way to full publication – which messages we should be paying attention to and which messages we should be ignoring.

Jon Lebkowsky: When you mention friends, it makes me think about how we've started to use "friend" as a verb...

Clay Shirky: Yeah, I'm going to friend you – yes, exactly.

Jon Lebkowsky: So are we changing the meaning of that word, of what it means to be a friend.

Clay Shirky: I don't think we're changing it so much as we're adding to it, which is to say that I think people still have a sense of the old meaning of friend, as someone you would do a favor to if they were in some real trouble. We still keep that meaning around. I don't think that sense has been denatured, but I do think that the word friend now includes someone who sent you a message on Facebook, and you friended them because why not?

There was an interesting period during the dominance of Friendster where people would talk about their friends, and then their friendsters, and their friendsters were people who they were friends with only on that site. So we may see some growing subtlety in people being able to signal, "Yeah, this person is actually a friend of mine, whereas that person is only a contact I have on Facebook."

Jon Lebkowsky: Another major change I noted around 2000, when I first started using Ryze, and for all those years before that – I had been online by then for a decade or more – and I couldn't see my online friends. And then Ryze created a social network platform where anyone could easily upload digital photos, and at the same time digital photos were more available, because digital cameras were coming out. Suddenly you had visual reference, and today nobody really thinks about whether they know what their "friends" that they never met face to face actually look like, because everybody has a pile of pictures online at Ryze or Flickr or Facebook.

Clay Shirky: Yeah, what we know about those people has been transformed.

Jon Lebkowsky: The experience seems to have more depth now than in the nineties, even though we had really powerful experiences that were text-based. Now we have so much more that we can do.

You said at one point in one of your chapters that our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they're a challenge to it? What were you thinking about there?

Clay Shirky: For the last hundred years, the key organizational conversation was, are big challenges better taken on by the state, by the government, raising taxes and spending the money, or are they better taken on by businesses operating in the marketplace. But the dot dot dot at the end of that sentence was because obviously people can't get together and do these things for themselves.

There was a basic assumption, both in capitalist and communist theories of large scale action, that the complexities of ordinary life would defeat the ability of groups to come together and do things on their own.

It seems to me that what's happened is that this thesis has now been rendered false in a surprising number of cases, and, maybe more importantly, a growing number of cases. There are places now where people are coming together and creating value for one another without doing it in either the framework of government or the framework of business.

I gave a talk at Supernova, a brief talk on the Perl programming language. I was pointing out that the Perl programming language, which has been an absolute mainstay of the web from the earliest days, is held together by love. It's not held together either by government intervention or by corporate investment. It's held together because a bunch of people love Perl, and more importantly, they love one another in the context of Perl. They like being part of a community that makes this language work, and work better.

The idea that this could create a programming language as good and as powerful and as ubiquitiously-used as Perl is new. One of the big shifts, and one of the reasons I wrote this book – this is a non-techie book, instead of writing for my usual audience of folks, programmers and engineers, I've actually tried to write it for my Mom – to explain why this is a big deal. One of the things I think is happening, is that the pattern of groups being able to come together and do things for themselves is now spreading outside of the technical and geek communities, and is becoming a general social capability.

Jon Lebkowsky: You mentioned love as a motivator and social glue. Do you have a technical, operational definition for love?

Clay Shirky: You know, I don't. (Laughter.) I have the same definition that the supreme court used to have for pornography, which is I know it when I see it.

That's actually an interesting question, I should take that seriously. Right now it's defined largely by negation, which is to say, when people come together and do things together without obviously being motivated by either requirements or payments... if I'm doing something, and it's not because my boss told me to do it, or I'm doing something and it's not because I think I'll get more money at the end of the day, if I do it – then almost by definition I'm doing it for love.

That strikes me as kind of an unsatisfactory definition, and there is so much work yet to be done on motivation. In part it hasn't been done because neoclassical economics assumes that most human motivations can be backed into money, so that you can use money as this kind of universal calculator, even if there's no money involved in the actual transaction. And we now know that to be false, from a lot of research and behavioral economics. There are some jobs where people will do the job better if they're not paid, which is to say if they sense they're being asked for a favor and are participating in community building, they'll actually do a better job than if they're simply given money to do the work.

Jon Lebkowsky: Isn't this like the work of Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith with communities of practice?

Clay Shirky: That's exactly right. Communities of practice is one of these great patterns of demonstrating, to the consternation of many neoclassical economists, the degree to which people will go out of their way to help each other with no obvious return.

The community of practice that I love is the high dynamic range (HDR) photography people on Flickr. Back in the old days, if some new photographic technique came along, it would take 5-7 years to spread from someone's photo studio to photo magazines, and finally to widespread visibility in Popular Photography, and the average darkroom.

You could see the high dynamic range technique, where you take multiple exposures of the same scene and combine them to get the brightest brights and the darkest darks, rip through Flickr, where people were posting these photos, and someone would come along, and say "Oh, my god, that's the greatest photo I've ever seen, I love it. How did you do that?" And then you had these threads that were thousands and tens of thousands of words long with pointers to external software, and other people posting images in the thread that would help illustrate things.

This community sprung up around high dynamic range photography, and they essentially explained it to themselves in the course of about three months. HDR photography went from being something that a handful of people knew how to do to a general technique that any photographer who's willing to spend an afternoon on Flickr could pick up and understand. And the speed of that spread wouldn't work if money were involved.

The awareness and the growth in expertise actually happened faster because people weren't asking for payment in return for value. They were asking to participate in a community that loved this stuff. I think we're going to see a huge amount of experimentation with those kinds of advantages, which will appear in all kinds of new places.

Jon Lebkowsky: In my own work, I've been looking at and thinking about how these sorts of things happen, especially in business environments. And we know that they do happen, and now there's a body of work... like Verna Allee and the value network people, who are saying, "We don't really have a way to capture that value, or quantify it, so how do we do that?" Are you familiar with the value networks body of work?

Clay Shirky: Yes, and one of the really interesting patterns that jumped out at me, doing a book about large scale collaboration, is that very often really large-scale collaboration, whether it's a Wikipedia or Linux or what have you, involves a small number of people who care an enormous amount, and then a large number of people who only care a little bit, but who are participating, who are adding their value to the overall work product.

What the value networks work seems to be to point to is ways in which you can create some of this kind of benefit without having everybody participating in a formal community of practice, and also getting more heterogenous kinds of skills and values involved. Everybody who's in the HDR community of practice on Flickr is (a) a photographer and (b) experimenting with HDR. But once you get to something like Wikipedia, there are people who are fact checkers, and there are people who are sentence editors, and there are people who are content creators. You get a kind of division of labor that's really quite different, and makes the whole more valuable, in part because of those differences.

Jon Lebkowsky: There's a whole interesting question about kibitzing, about lurkers in a community and the extent to which they actually add value. And, of course, many lurkers are never 100% lurkers. Even if they don't uncloak in public, they'll email people who are having conversations, and drive things along. There was something in your writing, an idea that suggests the shape of a fried egg, where you have a cluster of real activity in the middle, and you have a sort of supportive community around it that's less involved, but still contributing.

Clay Shirky: I haven't used the fried egg analogy, but I love that. And the observing community is the pool from which the participants are drawn, even if a majority of the people in the observing community never become participants.

Jon Lebkowsky: We've been thinking about that in Austin, where there's an active community of bootstrap entrepreneurs. One thing we've been talking about recently, that I had been thinking about for a while, is the idea that you could potentially do the larger things that people normally grow monolithic corporations to do... that you could cluster and aggregate networks of smaller companies to collaborate to do these larger things. Instead of having a big company with departments, you just have a network of companies that have figured out how to organize so that they can really depend on each other. And that gets to the issue of trust, which you talk about...

Clay Shirky: What you just said is, in my mind, the key piece of economic analysis, which is when the transaction costs are down, then the ability of smaller groups to find one another and bind themselves to one another as needed goes up. And once you get those two things happening at the same time, you can actually start figuring out when you'd be better off decreasing the size of the group and increasing the discoverability of the interface.

Jon Lebkowsky: How would this relate to the question of trust, and how you get the group to come together and to work? How would that relate to your trinity of plausible promise, effective tool, acceptable bargain...?

Clay Shirky: A lot of it starts with the plausible promise, with telling people, if they come together, they can actually do something successfully. And very often modest success matters more than audacious goals.

If you look at the original document proposing either Wikipedia or Linux, the most striking thing is how incredibly modest the original requests were. But that was enough. It was enough to get people involved. And then, if you can do that, and in many ways that's the hardest thing to do... then you get to the problem of figuring out which tool to use, and what bargain to use.

The tool is relatively simple, which is to say there's a few classic misakes to avoid – if you want people to converge on some sort of shared work product, don't launch a mailing list. If you want people to diverge and generate lots and lots of competing ideas, don't launch a wiki. But fitting the tool to the job is in many ways a matter of looking out and seeing who else has got a problem similar to yours and what tools are they using.

The bargain is the hardest one of all, particularly around this idea of subdividing into smaller groups that then interact with one another. Because the bargain really says, "what are the users' expectations of one another over the long haul? &ndash as opposed to anything that the site's founder or host can promise.

Getting the culture right is really an art, and not a science... which is to say that your early culture is going to be set by the people who happen to come around, and you've got to work with that while, at the same time, keeping your eye on wanting to have a culture that can scale up over the long haul.

Kathy Sierra has a fantastic example from Java Ranch, which was a site meant to host friendly conversations among Java programmers. They wanted to get away from the kind of supercilious snarkiness that characterizes a lot of technical communities. So they have a terms of service you have to accept to be part of the community, and the actual terms of service, in its entirety, is "Be nice."

And that was their way of saying, "We can't enforce every little jot and tittle of user interaction. We know people are going to say things that may upset one another. All we're going to say is, our standard of behavior is that you should be nice to each other, and if we see that not happening, we're going to intervene."

It's such a beautiful rebuke to all the lawyerese of you can't do this or that, where people try to enumerate everything that could go wrong. Because what they did, I think, in that model, is that they managed to streamline the kind of thing that has to go into a long-term user bargain, into a very simple to understand concept, and I'd like to see more of that and less of the "we had the lawyers wrote the terms of service, and suddenly it's fifteen printed pages."

Jon Lebkowsky: We have everybody online now publishing with the same forms of media, everybody's got access to everything, and you've got mass communication on one end of the spectrum, and on the other end you have very intimate but still public conversations, which is kind of interestingly weird. Is that a gradual continuum? How much are people really confused about the kinds of conversations they're having?

Clay Shirky: This is an experiment I want to see run, but I think this is a very interesting question. Here is my hypothesis: that one of the things that people create some kind of really deep mental model for is modes of communication. People my age and older have a very good sense of when to call someone on the phone, and when to send them a personal letter, and when to go see them. But we don't have such a good sense of when to email them, or IM them, or Twitter or what have you, because all of that stuff was invented after we had already solidified our sense of the media landscape. All of those things are still new.

One way to test this would be to see whether fifteen year olds today have a literally more intuitive sense of when to call, when to SMS, when to email, and when to IM. And I think they do. I think that the confusion around media is largely with people who have grown up in the environment we grew up in, where television is one thing, whereas the phone is another thing. The medium that reaches groups isn't a communications medium. The medium that is a communications medium doesn't reach groups. When all that has gotten overturned, it looks strange to us that people having group communications in a public medium – you know, these half a dozen friends, are all Live Journaling one another about their trip to the mall, or the party last Friday. But to those kids I don't think it seems weird at all. And if that's true, then that's the kind of generation gap that came up around the use of the telephone or the use of the telegram, and I think it's something society will have to weather for thirty years. If I'm wrong about that, which is to say, if increased numbers and kinds of media actually lead to increased social confusion, then I think that society is going to have to develop some formal methods of etiquette in order to figure out how to manage all of this proliferation of new communications options we've gotten.

Jon Lebkowsky: Twitter has turned out to be a very interesting communication space. I really didn't get it, didn't have the right experience of it for the longest time, because I was just using the web interface. Occasionally I would activate it for my phone if I was stuck in traffic and bored, and wanted company.

But I recently started using Twitter via IM using GTalk. and that's an entirely different experience, in that you really get the flow of conversation, seeing comments as they're posted.

One of the interesting things about Twitter is that you have this continuum that we were talking about... you have some people who come to Twitter only because they want to broadcast, to announce something to the world, or at least to their network. So they'll show up and post a url, "this is my latest blog post" or whatever. But they don't really hang out and have conversations. More often, though, Twitter users have public conversations where they're talking either to everybody, or to a specific person through a public reply. And you have people who want fairly intimate conversations and will go to direct messages, which are private. So there's this whole spectrum of experience you can have on Twitter.

Clay Shirky: I think like everybody, when it came out, I started playing with it, but it seemed to me that most of the action and gone private, but I had not tried to use the GTalk interface. I'll have to give that a try.

Jon Lebkowsky: What is the problem of filtering, and how has it changed? You talk about a priori filtering in the publishing world, and how filtering is now more after-the-fact.

Clay Shirky: The problem with filtering is, now that there's not bottleneck for production, there is no way to filter in advance. You can't filter the good from the mediocre in advance, simply because it's too expensive. No one has the cash needed to simply keep on top of everything that's coming down the pipe, because now everybody has a pipe.

So filtering has now gone to this post-hoc thing. As good as it has gotten, with things like PageRank and del.icio.us and Technorati, and so forth, we're still in a world where the average experience of wandering around the web is of being exposed to all kinds of things that are really kind of irrelevant. The searching and sorting problem hasn't yet settled itself down.

One of the things I try to explain to people when they say how much junk there is on the web is to use the analogy of a book store. You go into a book store and your experience of the book store is, "oh, I went right to the section on philosophy, and I went right to the books on Plato, and there they were." So I know that there's all this great literature in the bookstore.

But if you picked up that book store, and you shook the contents out into the street, and you waded in and started picking books at random, you'd find Chicken Soup for the Hoosier Soul and Love's Tender Fury, and all of this stuff. In fact, our experience of the book store as being a site of a lot of really good content is in large part because we're really good at ignoring 99% of what's in there. If you're not going to the book store for self-help books, you don't have to look at them.

And because the filtering problem on the web is so enormous, and because we're still in relatively early days of figuring out how to solve it, we can't yet get to that happy state where the stuff I'm not interested in doesn't show up. It takes a much more active stance in terms of searching and grooming and so forth to zero in on the good stuff.

So it seems to me that the problem of filtering is going to remain one of the key problems of the age, for the next few decades, in part because the volume of material people are producing is still going up. And once we get a relatively good solution for filtering the web, for example, along comes Twitter – here's this new medium that we don't have these filtering tools for. How do you figure out what to read and what to ignore and what to save and what to throw away, and so forth? That problem is coming up now, and is going to keep coming up over and over again for as long as we're on this ride. We keep going to a place where there's so much more content this year than last year, so a lot of our old strategies are broken.

Jon Lebkowsky: It seems to me that one of the real problems of filtering is that, to the extent we feel that we have to filter and set up filters, that we're liable to exclude things that we didn't know we would find interesting.

Clay Shirky: That's right. And designing filters with a certain amount of serendipity involved is a key part of this. But even then, even with some serendipity, it is so easy to have the amount of content radically overflow any strategy that we've got for sorting the stuff that we care about from the stuff we don't care about. Even with a serendipity meter built in, we still have to work hard to get this right.

Jon Lebkowsky: Where do you see things going? You've written a good analysis of where we are, but what comes next?

Clay Shirky: The ladder that I develop in the book is how much does the individual have to coordinate themselves with the group to get an effect. So the simplest thing is sharing, right? Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube, Napster... my ability to share with millions of others and then for all of us to profit from that requires very little coordination from me. That pattern is very easy to bootstrap.

The next pattern up is collaboration, where there actually is some more coordination required between me and other people. This is Open Source software, this is Wikipedia, and so on.

The pattern that strikes me as being most radically different from what we've had before is collective action, the pattern where the group comes together, and stands or falls depending on the actions of the entire group. Every member of the group is affected by the action of the group as a whole. I spent a lot of time looking, in particular, at the political prostests in Belarus that are using the flash mob model for protesting. It seems to me that the collective action model, where the group isn't just a loose collection of individuals, it's actually a unit, has not yet seen a lot of traction. There have been some interesting experiments, but most of the interesting work there is still in the future. And that's what I'm watching out for – what's coming with the future of collective action, because I think there's a huge amount of work still to be done there.

Jon Lebkowsky: When we were doing the Extreme Democracy book, and as a precursor to that we were having the emergent democracy conversation, the Joi Ito thing. The big question for us was emergent leadership.

Clay Shirky: Yes.

Jon Lebkowsky: How does that work. How do we actually have leaders emerge, and how does the group know – how does a flock of birds, for instance, know which bird is in the lead at any given time.

Clay Shirky: One of the big surprises about the Open Source movement is how many of the projects had a benevolent dictator for life at their head. There are a few that don't, like the Apache Foundation. But Perl and Python and Ruby and Linux and on and on had the charismatic, technically adept founder at the head. How people find and identify those leaders, and what lessons we can take from the technical community to the nontechnical community, I think is a really big open question.

Jon Lebkowsky: We had a sort of laboratory for thinking about this with Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds, the business he created around an online community. When Howard realized that he needed to do something with Electric Minds, that it really wasn't working as a business, the question was, where does it go? He got a buyer who agreed to honor the community. Then the question was, if Howard was going to become just another community member, who was going to lead? It's a long story, but in the end, the community found that the benevolent dictator model seemed to work very well.

Clay Shirky: Yes, absolutley. And it locks the "benevolent dictator" out of participation. Stacy Horn, who founded Echo, had this problem. She could not go out and socialize with her own users, because she was the owner, and everybody kind of behaved weirdly around her. So she ended up having to mainly consign herself to conversations that were only populated by people who remembembered when Echo was just a few hundred people, so that they wouldn't treat her so weirdly. But she couldn't, in fact, be just an ordinary member of the community.

Jon Lebkowsky: That's interesting. Howard's next thing, of course, was his semi-private Brainstorms community, where he's the door. Everybody comes through him, so he knows everybody who comes in. That weirdness that Stacy Horn experienced may have been there to some extent with Electric Minds, but it's absolutely not there at Brainstorms.

Clay Shirky: No, because you're already going through Howard on the way in, so you're sort of aware of that.

Jon Lebkowsky: Yeah, and even though he's still kind of the benevolent dictator, he's a member of the community. The problem you run into is when you have some people in the community that feel you need to throw a person out, because they're misbehaving – this has been a big deal on the WELL, for instance. In one case, there was a guy who was trashing the commons on the WELL in a big way, but because of the strong tradition of free speech on the WELL, the managers didn't want to just throw him out, and there was a quandary – what do you do about this guy? Because you didn't really have a strong benevolent dictator who would just throw him out. You had to have a process, and the process extended the pain.

Clay Shirky: It's a dilemma, deciding when the needs of the group trump the needs of the individual. And it's a tough moment, nobody likes that moment. It's anti-democratic in one way, and yet all groups require that, because all groups acquire the kinds of trolls that you're talking about here.

Jon Lebkowsky: The tragedy of the commons.

Clay Shirky: Yeah, exactly.

Jon Lebkowsky: And you made a strong case, I think, in your writing, for the need for governance. Obviously there is always some governing principles in any group, whether they're formal or informal. It's a problem when we try to put those principles aside.

So in closing, how do you think governance is going to play out in the future? The Internet is a big laboratory for governance models. What impact could that have on our actual, formal mechanisms for governance?

Clay Shirky: The biggest impact will be if we find some way to defer to groups, to allow groups to come together and make some choices for themselves that the government defers to. Or, if we start regarding the output of groups as being legitimate expressions of the will of the people.

Many people have floated this idea of a policy wiki, or the notion of doing the national budget using the wisdom of crowds. Those experiments would be, I think, the most radical. On the way to that, even before the really radical stuff, I think the big change is going to be just the number of times that people start to pull together and have success, as with this airline passengers bill of rights – after the industry fought it off for eight years, suddenly in eight months a little group came from nowhere with no budget and no staff, and actually succeeded in rewriting the law. [Author's Note: Since this conversation, the 2nd Circuit Court has struck down the NY State Passenger's Bill of Rights. Now the test of the people vs the airline industry moves to Congress and the Supreme Court.]

I think the big change in government is going to be with people getting some sense that if they come together, they can actually do things for themselves.

Jon Lebkowsky: I think that's really important. I think the problem that we have, even within the Democratic party, is that there's a set of people who'll say, say screw the will of the people, the people don't know what they're talking about. We know what's best for them.

Clay Shirky: The superdelegates, in a way, were set up specifically to keep people from sending unelectably liberal candidates into the general election. But it's such a bad fix for that problem. Now that that system might actually kick in, I think everybody in the Democratic National Committee is trying to find a way to back away from it. Because I think the amount of attention, and the number of new voters they turned out... if they were to actually have the election go to someone who hadn't been ratified by the people, I think it would be a catastrophe.

The Worldchanging Interview: Clay Shirky is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 10:03 AM)

Optimism is a Political Act

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:56:41 +0000

This article was written by Alex Steffen in March 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

I've written before about my belief that in times like these, optimism is a powerful political act. As I put it in the book,

Optimism is a political act.
Entrenched interests use despair, confusion and apathy to prevent change. They encourage modes of thinking which lead us to believe that problems are insolvable, that nothing we do can matter, that the issue is too complex to present even the opportunity for change. It is a long-standing political art to sow the seeds of mistrust between those you would rule over: as Machiavelli said, tyrants do not care if they are hated, so long as those under them do not love one another. Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in Western popular culture, but, in reality, cynicism in average people is the attitude exactly most likely to conform to the desires of the powerful – cynicism is obedience.

Optimism, by contrast, especially optimism which is neither foolish nor silent, can be revolutionary. Where no one believes in a better future, despair is a logical choice, and people in despair almost never change anything. Where no one believes a better solution is possible, those benefiting from the continuation of a problem are safe. Where no one believes in the possibility of action, apathy becomes an insurmountable obstacle to reform. But introduce intelligent reasons for believing that action is possible, that better solutions are available, and that a better future can be built, and you unleash the power of people to act out of their highest principles. Shared belief in a better future is the strongest glue there is: it creates the opportunity for us to love one another, and love is an explosive force in politics.

Great movements for social change always begin with statements of great optimism.

Recently, though, I've been getting asked a lot how it's possible to remain optimistic when the news is so bad, and progress on problems like climate change or global poverty seems hopeless slow. These questions started me thinking about why the tone of coverage and debate about the big issues we face is so unrelentingly grim.

Some of that darkness comes, undoubtedly, from legitimate despair: from solastalgia about the loss of the natural world or from compassion for the horrible suffering of the millions whom our global economy has left behind. Some of it is the cynicism of disappointed idealists, folks who've seen so much of the underside of human nature that they've abandoned hope. Some is the narrative lure of collapse.

But I've come more and more to think that the particular dynamic we see in today's media and political debates, in both North America and Europe, springs also from politics. That its political nature goes largely unrecognized, even by some of that politics' fiercest partisans, may be merely a matter unexamined assumptions.

Here's what I see that politics being:

1) An explicit statement that we are incapable of actually solving the planet's most pressing problems, and that to consider doing so is "unrealistic."

2) A mostly unstated assumption that the reason embracing bold solutions is unrealistic is because those solutions involve unbearable costs.

3) A rarely voiced belief that "realism" ought best to be defined as "in the interests of those doing well today," and that "unbearable costs" ought best to be defined as "any meaningful change in circumstances whatsoever."

4) A widely practiced stance that, therefore, expressions of concern and extremely modest, almost symbolic, small steps and half measures are the appropriate course of action.

Though often combined with the politics of fear, this political stance might better be thought of as "the politics of impossibility." (It's as if Eeyore were running the public debate.)

Consider, instead, the politics of optimism:

1) That realism ought best to be defined as "within our capacity" and "necessary."

2) That we have the capacity to create and deploy solutions to the world's biggest problems, and the magnitude of the consequences of failure (both for ourselves and generations to come) demands that we act immediately.

3) That it is possible to act in such a way that the prospects of most people on the planet are improved. While certain costs will be incurred, the returns on those investments will be quite attractive, not only in ecological stability, international security and human well-being, but in terms of plain old economic prosperity. These solutions will make the future better than the present for the almost everyone, and greatly improve the lots of our children and grandchildren.

4) Therefore, defining our win scenarios, imagining the kind of future we want to create, describing the solutions that will make building that future possible, and publicly committing ourselves to success are the appropriate course of action.

Nothing about the politics of optimism needs to be naive. We can understand that people are fallible, mostly self-motivated and sometimes even mistaken about what's in their own best interests. We can stress the importance of informed decision-making, demand rigor and note uncertainty. We can recognize the massive differentials in power and wealth in our society and be clear-headed about the difficulty of opposing those whose power and wealth is tied to planetary destruction. We can anticipate setbacks and failures, disappointments and betrayals. We can expect corruption and demand transparency. We can freely admit the profound difficulty of the work yet to be done, even the possibility of total failure.

We can freely acknowledge the tremendous struggle ahead of us, and yet choose to remain decidedly optimistic, and to work from a fundamental belief in the possibilities of the future. When we do that, we liberate ourselves from some of the burden of despair and powerlessness we've all been saddled with at the dawn of the 21st Century.

But when we do it in public -- when we stand up and refuse to accept the idea that failure is preordained and action is unrealistic -- we strike right down to the heart of the political conflict we really face: the conflict between our party of the future and their party of the past.

I'm more and more convinced that incrementalism in the absence of committed vision almost always serves the politics of impossibility. Paradoxically, a lot of old school activism does as well. The impossibility lobby is entirely OK with Greenpeace or whoever doing direct action to highlight the latest dire predictions about the ruin of the Earth, because they've mostly moved on from debating reality to defining response. They're OK with people thinking the crisis is downright apocalyptic, so long as those same people don't think there's really anything we can do differently.

That's why our best hope lies in a fighting optimism, an optimism that's willing to confront the impossibility lobby and its messengers and make very clear that a feeble, halting response is not the rational or responsible response, but a corrupt and morally bankrupt response.

Every time we explain how a better future might be built, we redraw the boundaries of the possible. We show that the realm of choice available to us is actually quite large, and even includes paths that might, for instance, harm the interests of rich old guys who own big chunks of coal companies or the petrochemical industry but improve the prospects of pretty much everyone else.

We need to accelerate innovation and magnify vision. We need to school ourselves in the possible, share ideas, imagine outcomes, weigh options. We need to figure out how best to transform the systems we've built. I definitely don't have the answers personally, but Worldchanging aims to be a useful tool for people undertaking that exploration.

Ultimately, though, we need something more than better answers. We need millions of people who are willing to teach the teachable, comfort the disheartened and confront the scoundrels. We need to take our politics public and take on the whole culture of cynical defeatism. On some days, I think we need an optimism uprising.

The Politics of Optimism is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 9:56 AM)

Moving From Rhetoric to Reality: Clean, Green Jobs

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:48:20 +0000

This article was written by Joel Makower in March 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

The promise of the green economy and the clean-tech revolution is that they will bring a new wave of job opportunities — productive and respectable jobs at every part of the economic spectrum, from line workers to senior managers. Nonprofit groups like the Apollo Alliance have made this part of their raison d'etre. A steady drumbeat of studies since the late 1990s has told us that burgeoning markets for solar, wind, clean transportation, and other technologies would represent the next big wave of job creation. Cities and states have been positioning to become clean-tech hubs, eyeing the workforce development potential. Organizations representing low-income populations have been viewing the green economy as an entry point for those near the bottom of the economic ladder.

So, now that clean technology and the greening of business seem to be in full swing, where are all the jobs? So far, they're nowhere in sight — at least not in any appreciable numbers.

The reasons are many and varied. Most of the big companies in the clean-energy business — the BPs, GE, and PG&E's of the world — don't seem to be going on hiring sprees, typically creating clean-tech business units from within. So, too, with much of the green business activity — it has to do with efficiency, with doing more with the same or fewer resources, and that includes human resources. Few of the start-ups are undergoing massive hiring, and when they do, they're more often in the market for engineers and other skilled professionals. And the jobs that are being created are disperse, geographically, meaning that there are few robust Silicon Valley-like clean-tech clusters, where companies congregate and jobs proliferate.

Despite such obstacles, there seems to be new energy building behind the notion of a Big Green Job Machine. Last week in Pittsburgh, for example, a Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference, organized by the Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers union, drew more than 900 people from business, government, nonprofits, academe, and labor unions to share strategies for increasing job opportunities in the environmental and clean-tech sectors.

There were about 8 million green jobs in the U.S. in industries that attracted $148 million in investment in 2007, up 60 percent from the year before, Lois Quam, managing director of alternative investments at Piper Jaffray, told the conference. I haven't yet seen the research on which this was based, but I'm intrigued. As I noted in our State of Green Business report, tracking green job creation has been difficult. One reason is that green jobs, at least by my definition, aren't often identified as such, and can be found throughout companies of all sizes and sectors. Does a procurement manager — whose job entails implementing her company's environmentally preferable procurement mandate, thereby seeking out and purchasing millions of dollars a year of recycled, energy-efficient, and other green products — count as a "green job"? What about the loading dock laborer whose job it is to make sure all packaging materials are recycled? Or the facility manager working to replace maintenance staples with green cleaning products? Are these counted among the "green jobs"? Possibly, but I doubt it.

Fact is, there's no good definition of "green job." Consider this report, released last week, by Raquel Rivera Pinderhughes, professor of urban studies at San Francisco State University. Titled Green Collar Jobs: An Analysis of the Capacity of Green Businesses to Provide High Quality Jobs for Men and Women with Barriers to Employment (Download - pdf), it focuses on opportunities in the San Francisco Bay Area. According to Pinderhughes,

Green collar jobs are blue collar jobs in green businesses — that is, manual labor jobs in businesses whose products and services directly improve environmental quality. . . . What unites these jobs is that all of them are associated with manual labor work that directly improves environmental quality.

Pinderhughes lists 22 types of green collar jobs, from food production (using organic and/or sustainably grown agricultural products) to furniture making (from environmentally certified and recycled wood), from parks and open space (maintenance and expansion) to printing (with non-toxic inks and dyes and recycled papers). It's a good list, but it doesn't seem to cover all that's out there.

Another report, Green-Collar Jobs in America's Cities (download - pdf), released for the Pittsburgh event, lays out steps for creating comprehensive green-collar job strategies at the local level. It also profiles some of the great work already underway around the country. The guide — published by Green For All, the Apollo Alliance, the Center for American Progress, and the Center on Wisconsin Strategy — focuses on local green jobs in clean energy industries: energy efficiency, renewable energy, alternative transportation, and low-carbon fuels.

Yet another new report, Greener Pathways, from the same consortium, profiles some of the best examples in the U.S. where work is underway to develop green jobs, including green construction career development in California, Iowa's biofuels job-training bonds, wind technician training in Oregon; and Pennsylvania's green re-industrialization.

It's all very encouraging, but it feels like there's one key group that's not yet at the table: companies. A look at the impressive speaker roster for the Pittsburgh event reveals only eight of 86 speakers from the private sector — and only three large companies: BP, Gamesa, and Johnson Controls.

Why aren't bigger companies more engaged? Do they not foresee a need for talent in this arena? Are their labor pools overflowing? Or are they simply not tuned in to the opportunity? Any ideas?

For now, groups like the Apollo Alliance and Green for All will have to go it alone, and they have their work cut out for them, helping to ensure, in the words of Green for All founder and president, Van Jones, that "the clean-tech wave lifts all boats." It won't be easy, especially without the active participation of companies in the clean and green sector.

As Jones told me recently: "The next set of challenges have to do with going from rhetoric to reality."

Where Are All the Clean, Green Jobs? is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 9:48 AM)

Solastalgia and the Mental Affects of Climate Change

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:34:22 +0000

This article was written by Sanjay Khanna in March 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

A small yet growing body of evidence suggests that how people think and feel is being influenced strongly by ecosystem transformation related to climate change and industry-related displacement from the land. These powerful stressors are occurring more frequently around the world.

A case in point: When researchers from the Centre for Rural and Remote Mental Health at the University of Newcastle in Australia conducted interviews in drought-affected communities in New South Wales in 2005, the responses suggested some of their subjects may have been suffering from a recently described psychological condition called solastalgia (pronounced so-la-stal-juh).

Solastalgia describes a palpable sense of dislocation and loss that people feel when they perceive changes to their local environment as harmful. It’s a neologism that Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher at the University of Newcastle’s School of Environmental and Life Sciences, created in 2003.

Albrecht’s work among communities distraught by black-coal strip mining in New South Wales’ Upper Hunter Region convinced him that the English language needed a new term to connect the experience of ecosystem loss to mental health concerns.

“The sense of a home landscape being violated [by strip mining-related environmental damage] seemed to have disturbed the region’s social ecology so much that the psychic or mental health of many people living in the zone of high impact was being affected,” he says.

Albrecht’s stunning insight? That there might be a wide variety of shifts in the health of an ecosystem—from subtle landscape changes related to global warming to desolate wastelands created by large-scale strip mining—that diminish people’s mental health.

In Eastern Australian communities, where the toll of a six-year-long drought has been devastating, interviews with farmers provided additional momentum for the solastalgia concept.

In one such interview, a female farmer poignantly described the loss of her garden oasis. “Our gardens have had to die,” she said, “because our house dam has been dry…. So it’s very depressing for a woman because a garden is an oasis out here with this dust…you know, to come home to a nice green lawn is just… that’s all gone, so you’ve got dust at your back door.”

While persistent drought and open-pit coal mining may be extreme cases, if the environmental degradation of the past hundred years is any indication, our contemporary lifestyles, built on a dwindling resource base, have failed to acknowledge how much the mental health of people and ecosystems is interrelated.

This may imply that the unrelenting media focus on weather-related and economic aspects of climate change does not adequately take into consideration the challenge of mitigating the psychological impact of global warming. How might we feel when the heat is relentless and our surrounding environment changes irrevocably? How might our mental health be affected?

In a recent Wired magazine article on Albrecht and the concept of solastalgia, “Global Mourning: How the next victim of climate change will be our minds,” writer Clive Thompson sensitively characterized as “global mourning” the potential impact of overwhelming environmental transformation caused by climate change. Thompson cogently summed up Albrecht’s view of what solastalgia might look like were it to become an epidemic of emotional and psychic instability causally linked to changing climates and ecosystems.

Albrecht also emphasizes that feelings of melancholia and homesickness have previously been recorded among Aboriginal peoples in the Americas and Australia who were forcibly moved from their home territories by U.S., Canadian and Australian governments in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Sanjay Khanna: You speak of psychoterratic and somaterratic illnesses. What are they?

Glenn Albrecht: Psychoterratic illness involves the psyche or mind and terra or earth. So a psychoterratic illness would be an earth-related mental illness, where both nostalgia and solastalgia are examples of people being made “mentally ill” by the severing of “healthy” links between themselves and their home or territory.

Somaterratic illness, on the other hand, involves soma or the body and relates to damage done to the human body, its physiology and/or genetics, as a result of the loss of ecosystem health by, for example, toxic pollution in any given area of land.

SK: You note on your blog that there are antecedents to solastalgia.

GA: Yes, David Rapport, a past professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, is a pioneer in the study of the health of natural ecosystems and their relationship with humans. In the 1970s, he described “ecosystem distress syndrome,” which was what happened when an ecosystem couldn't restore its balance after an external disturbance.

Once I fully appreciated this concept, I realized there must be a human equivalent to ecosystem distress syndrome, that is, a home environment so profoundly disturbed that it affected the balance of well being or the mental health of people within their social ecology.

The interviews of affected people I conducted along with Nick Higginbotham and Linda Connor in strip-mined areas of the Upper Hunter Valley showed that people’s sense of place was being violated and that this was profoundly disturbing them. Their home environment was being desolated and it seemed to us that the vital link between ecosystem health and human health, both physical and mental, was being severed.

SK: Can you tell us a little bit more about the origins of solastalgia?

GA: Solastalgia’s Latin roots combine three ideas: The solace that one’s environment provides, the desolation caused by that environment’s degradation and the pain or distress that occurs inside a person as a result.

Solastalgia brings into English a much-needed word that links a mental state to a state of the biophysical environment. The need for new concepts in the face of what is happening under climate change has seen other cultures develop new terms that have affinities with solastalgia.

The Inuit, for example, have a new word, uggianaqtuq (pronounced OOG-gi-a-nak-took), which relates to climate change and has connotations of the weather as a once reliable and trusted friend that is now acting strangely or unpredictably. And the Portuguese use the word saudade to describe a feeling one has for a loved one who is absent or has disappeared. The upshot is that under the pressure of climate change, your preferred climate and ecosystem might well be thought of as a lover gone missing or turned bad.

SK: How might your research impact on psychiatry and the diagnosis of psychoterratic illnesses such as solastalgia?

GA: Alongside five other researchers, our four-person team co-wrote a summary of our research on the mental health impacts of mining and drought for psychological and psychiatric professionals. The paper, “Solastalgia: the distress caused by climate change,” was published in Australasian Psychiatry, a publication of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, in November 2007.

Our team has mused that people badly affected by solastalgia would benefit from a set of professionally developed diagnostic tools so that solastalgia could be listed as a condition that required diagnosis and professional attention.

We’re happy for other people to take that challenge up and there are some academic psychiatrists who are interested in exploring these ideas further. However, given that key aspects of solastalgia are existential, the traditions of environmental philosophy and medical psychiatry may not come together so harmoniously. The melancholia of solastalgia is not the same as clinical depression, but it may well be a precursor to serious psychic disturbance.

That said, it’s worth remembering that up until the mid-twentieth century, the medical profession viewed nostalgia as a diagnosable psycho-physiological illness in which, for example, soldiers fighting in foreign lands became so homesick and melancholic it could kill them.

Today psychiatrists would see the condition of rapid and unwelcome severing from home as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an outcome of an acute stressor such as warfare or a Hurricane Katrina.

Solastalgia on the other hand is most often the result of chronic environmental stress; it is the lived experience of gradually losing the solace a once stable home environment provided. It is therefore appropriate to diagnose solastalgia in the face of slow and insidious forces such as climate change or mining.

SK: Would you tell us a little bit about the transdisciplinary team that you participate on?

GA: Nick Higginbotham, a social psychologist colleague who specializes in epidemiology and health matters, is working to gather empirical data for our solastalgia research. He has developed a much-needed environmental distress scale (EDS) that teases out the specific environmental components of distress from all the other things that go on in a person’s life. We will be using this scale in the new AUS$430K grant the team has received from the Australian Research Council to extend our earlier work by addressing “the lived experience (ethnography) of climate change” among people in the Hunter Valley.

Linda Connor, an ethnographer and social and medical anthropologist, handles the ethnography or cultural experience of all this. So collectively we have empirical (Higginbotham), cultural (Connor) and philosophical (me) interpretations of health and climate change. Finally, Sonia Freeman, our research assistant, has co-authored a number of papers.

SK: What implications might the recent apology by Kevin Rudd, the new Prime Minister of Australia, to the “stolen generations” of Australian Aborigines have in relation to solastalgia?

GA: The apology by Kevin Rudd to the stolen generations is about seeking forgiveness for the government-sanctioned taking of Indigenous children from their families and from their home territories (their “country”) from 1909 until 1969. There have been profound mental and physical health impacts from this process and many of the remaining stolen generations are now ageing but with a 17-year shorter life expectancy on average than non-indigenous Australians. Those who are alive today may be experiencing genuine nostalgia for a once-sustainable past and solastalgia within contemporary pathological and depressed home environments.

SK: Do you see a relationship between the conquest of Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia, the state of environmental degradation and the experience of loss that we are seeing today? If so, what is that relationship from your perspective and research?

GA: The answer is, yes, there is a relationship between the two colonial cultures: the two continents were colonized only by the systematic dispossession of complex and formerly sustainable Indigenous societies.

Traditional Indigenous cultures in the Americas and Australasia displayed a profound appreciation of the relationship between human and ecosystem health, something global culture is trying to rediscover under the label of sustainability.

Remnant aboriginal cultures are still being pushed aside by the dominant global model of economic growth and progress. Even today, their chronic health problems are likely related to social and political issues that are connected to ongoing dispossession.

I’ve had recent firsthand experience of the lives of Indigenous people leading semi-traditional lives in Northern Australia to see the importance of the connections between human health and ecosystem health. In Arnhem Land, Aborigines who live on what are called “outstations” have been able to maintain much stronger and healthier links to their traditional land. Their physical and mental health status is, as a consequence, much better than those whose links to their own land have been severed and who now live in crowded, dysfunctional communities.

SK: Some of the solastalgia symptoms you describe are similar to the loss of cultural identity, including the loss of language and ancestral memory. Loss of place seems an extension of this new global experience of weakened cultural identities and Earth-based ethical moorings.

GA: I have written on this topic in a professional academic journal and expressed the idea of having an Earth-based ethical framework that could contribute to maximizing the creative potential of human cultural and technological complexity and diversity without destroying the foundational complexity and diversity of natural systems in the process.

Our history shows that some people and cultures have a tendency to create pathological ways of thinking, but if we want to support a life-affirming ethic in the twenty-first century, we are in need of reform and change.

SK: In the context of accelerating environmental change, what would you say to young people about the planet they are inheriting? What does sustainability mean in the context of the overwhelming pace of environmental and economic change that we're seeing today?

GA: This is a tough one because the children of today face the double whammy of the escalating pace and scale of changes under the global forces of development and those of climate chaos. I’ve suggested to my own teenagers that what is happening is unacceptable ethically and practically and they should be in a state of advanced revolt about the whole deal.

From my perspective, supporting and maintaining the status quo is no longer a reasonable response to these big picture issues. At every point, we must challenge and refute this kind of thinking in a society that is clearly on a non-sustainable pathway.

Unfortunately, the lot in life of the youth today is to undo much of what has been done in the name of growth and progress in the last two hundred years. However, this does not mean a return to the past: As Herman Daly (the ecological economist) once said, you can have an economy that develops without growing.

On a personal level, I’m an optimistic, energetic philosopher and I believe that we must get our values more life orientated. I’m not willing to give up on encouraging change towards sustainability even in the face of what look like overwhelming negative forces.

The four-year grant recently awarded to our team will allow us to study the lived experience of climate change at a regional level. We’re happy that we’ll be able to start contributing data on how climate change is shifting culture, values and attitudes.

The next four years are critical. As a member of a research team, I believe that we’re right at the leading edge of change research and we are very committed to supporting the network of ecological and social relationships that promote human health. There’s hope in recognizing solastalgia and defeating it by creating ways to reconnect with our local environment and communities.

###

Sanjay Khanna is a writer and foresight researcher based in Vancouver, Canada. He can be reached at sk AT khannaresearch DOT com. His blog is at www.realisticsanctuary.com.

Photo by Paul Mathews

What Does Climate Change Do to Our Heads? is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 9:34 AM)

Cool Hybrids, Smart Grids and Renewable Energy

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:26:52 +0000

This article was written by Alex Steffen in January 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

This is interesting:

In an analysis of the potential impacts of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles projected for 2020 and 2030 in 13 regions of the United States, ORNL researchers explored their potential effect on electricity demand, supply, infrastructure, prices and associated emission levels. Electricity requirements for hybrids used a projection of 25 percent market penetration of hybrid vehicles by 2020 including a mixture of sedans and sport utility vehicles. Several scenarios were run for each region for the years 2020 and 2030 and the times of 5 p.m. or 10:00 p.m., in addition to other variables.
The report found that the need for added generation would be most critical by 2030, when hybrids have been on the market for some time and become a larger percentage of the automobiles Americans drive. In the worst-case scenario—if all hybrid owners charged their vehicles at 5 p.m., at six kilowatts of power—up to 160 large power plants would be needed nationwide to supply the extra electricity, and the demand would reduce the reserve power margins for a particular region's system.

The best-case scenario occurs when vehicles are plugged in after 10 p.m., when the electric load on the system is at a minimum and the wholesale price for energy is least expensive. Depending on the power demand per household, charging vehicles after 10 p.m. would require, at lower demand levels, no additional power generation or, in higher-demand projections, just eight additional power plants nationwide.

Of course, there's a mechanism for helping people plug their cars in at the right time: pricing energy in response to demand, through miracle smart grid technologies that will be available sometime in the very near future like, well, yesterday.

Of course, even the coolest of hybrids plugged into the smartest of grids won't save our bacon if we don't change the sources of our energy and the design of our communities.

Vehicle-to-Grid Plug-In Hybrids, for Free is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 9:26 AM)

Green Building, Compact Communities

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:22:21 +0000

This article was written by Alex Steffen in March 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Here's a debate where none is needed: the argument about whether green building, compact communities, or transit-supportive design is a better approach to improving the world.

The latest piece to kick up some dust is a report from the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, which, as reported by Reuters, says

"Green" construction could cut North America's climate-warming emissions faster and more cheaply than any other measure...

Elsewhere, people reaffirm that North Americans' best bet for carbon reduction is walking and taking transit, while others (often including myself) think density is the best lever, if we have to pick one with which to start.

Now, it's rarely much of an argument. There are green builders who are against growth management, and urban planners who hate transit and love cars, and transpogeeks who think architects are a useless form of decorator, but by and large, most advocates for each of these positions support the others, but just want to see their approach be taken on first.

But, of course, the whole argument is silly, and can be answered "all three, at once." All three strategies are mutually reinforcing (and equally difficult to implement without one another).

What we ought to be shooting for are compact communities, at sufficient densities to support lots of good transit options, composed entirely of high-quality, reasonably-sized green buildings, arranged around streets and public spaces that encourage walking and enjoying one's community, served by green infrastructure.

What I'd love to see is someone crunch the numbers not of a single approach -- increasing density for 7 units per acre to 9, or reducing energy use by 25%, or doubling trips taking by transit, or any of the other single-answer ideas that keep getting quantified -- but of a synergistic combined approach.

Because I'll bet money that when all these approaches are combined, the resulting economic and environmental benefits add up to far more than the sums of the parts seen through the studies done so far. It might well be that building bright green communities pays for itself while improving the quality of life of the people who live there... and saving the planet.

And if that's true, we're burning money as well as planet when we delay, go slow, and engage in false arguments about priorities.

(Creative Commons photo credit

Green? Dense? Walkable? is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 9:22 AM)

Seeing Chinook as Indicators

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:10:34 +0000

This article was written by Alex Steffen in March 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

To get a sense of how complex and tangled the task is of managing the planet, consider Chinook salmon.

The Sacramento River fall Chinook salmon run, which had been recovering in recent years, has suddenly collapsed, and no one seems to know why:

The almost complete collapse of the richest and most dependable source of Chinook salmon south of Alaska left gloomy fisheries experts struggling for reliable explanations — and coming up dry.
...Fishermen think the Sacramento River was mismanaged in 2005, when this year’s fish first migrated downriver. Perhaps, they say, federal and state water managers drained too much water or drained at the wrong time to serve the state’s powerful agricultural interests and cities in arid Southern California. The fishermen think the fish were left susceptible to disease, or to predators, or to being sucked into diversion pumps and left to die in irrigation canals.

But federal and state fishery managers and biologists point to the highly unusual ocean conditions in 2005, which may have left the fingerling salmon with little or none of the rich nourishment provided by the normal upwelling currents near the shore.

The life cycle of these fall run Chinook salmon takes them from their birth and early weeks in cold river waters through a downstream migration that deposits them in the San Francisco Bay when they are a few inches long, and then as their bodies adapt to saltwater through a migration out into the ocean, where they live until they return to spawn, usually three years later.

What wiped out the run? Climate change? Water diversions? Something we don't understand? The answer may well be all three, which illustrates the difficulty of trying to manage a complex natural system through highly political processes (which in the real world is essentially the only way they ever are managed).

Why care so much about the salmon? Well, fall Chinook are a $150 million fishery, first of all. That's a lot of fish missing from a lot of tables, and a lot of fishermen looking at hard times.

But there's another reason we should care: river and mountain ecosystems throughout the North Pacific depend on salmon to remain healthy. Here's how Ed Hunt explains it:

Pacific salmon do a strange thing. After they spawn, they die. ...After spawning, they leave their nutrient-rich carcasses behind. Many of the microscopic creatures that nibble on the carcasses eventually become prey for the next generation of fish. And so the parents nourish the young.
But salmon provide more than an indirect food source for baby salmon. At least 137 different species — from grizzly bears to gray wolves — depend on salmon for part of their diet. Even trees and plants benefit from the nutrients brought back by salmon from the seas.

Indeed, salmon used to transport so many marine nutrients to terrestrial ecosystems that environmental historian Richard White compared them to a conveyor belt. As Richard Manning explains:

Salmon are born, leave the stream as a pencil-sized fish, spend a few years fattening on ocean's bounty, then return with a gift to the natal stream, as much as 60 pounds of body mass made of not just carbon, but of the other nutrients the entire system needs. They import nutrients to landlocked life. This is the measure of the power of salmon.
Scientists now estimate that the Columbia River system once gained about 400 million pounds of nutrients from each year's salmon runs, before the dams broke the cycle. ... Samples of salmonberry bushes growing streamside reveal as much as 18 percent of their nutrients are ocean-derived, making it one of the more aptly named plants around. The same is true of trees. Plants are fed when carcasses decay and fertilize the soil, or when the dead salmon enter the food chain and eventually return to the soil as droppings. The faunal section of the chain contains at least 20 vertebrate species, including, of course, bears, but also surprisingly, deer and elk, which during spawning season are known to feed directly on salmon carcasses.

The upshot is that when the wrong forces combine -- when upwelling fails, ocean dead zones spread, streamside habitats are logged or developed and rivers are diverted to farmers' fields -- what is lost is not just a whole bunch of big fish, but the fundamental health of the ecosystems of an entire region.

If we're going to take our obligations as planetary managers seriously, we need to start being able to see through two lenses simultaneously -- a human lens and an systems lens -- and bring them into focus together. Despite decades of really smart, committed people trying to do that in Western North America, our vision's still blurry.

What might clear it up?

(If you want to learn more about salmon, by the way, I highly recommend browsing around over on the excellent Salmon Nation website.)

Creative Commons photo credit

Seeing Through Salmon is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 9:10 AM)

Climate Change is a Problem We Can Choose to Tackle

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:57:18 +0000

This article was written by Saul Griffith in March 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Saul Griffith is a remarkable guy: inventor, entrepreneur, Squid Labs, ThinkCycle and Instructables founder, columnist, genius grant winner and now president of the clean energy start-up Makani Power. A couple weeks ago, I did a talk at eTech, and while I was there, I had the fortune to hear Saul give his presentation on energy literacy and climate change.

Saul's essential point is that climate change is a problem we can choose to tackle: that the means are within our control, if we'll learn to think clearly about them. It's a great talk, and like all great talks, there's lots to quibble with in it (I'm sure Worldchanging readers will spring to the task), but at it's core, the message could not be more consonant with our goals as a site. Saul has kindly turned his talk into a series of posts for Worldchanging, which we'll be posting over the course of the week. --Alex

This is an old story, hopefully told in a new way.

Al Gore's documentary "An inconvenient truth" reached many people but his is just the most recent telling of a story that has been told many times before. At the peak of the energy crisis in the 1970’s, Amory Lovins wrote a book called Energy Strategies that largely outlined the problem we have today. In the 1950s Buckminster Fuller wrote many similar treatises on the dangers of over-consumption of energy and materials and its effects on the earth’s ecosystems. At the turn of last century, Henry Thoreau wrote a beautiful book about simple living in the woods of Massachusetts as an antidote to the destructive lifestyle of modern living he perceived at that time. Walden has sold many copies and inspired the modern conservation movements. Muir and Carson should be attributed for their contributions also. 2 millenia ago, in his book "Critias", Plato wrote about the demise of the forests:

“What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all fat and soft earth having wasted away, and only the bare framework of the land being left...there are some mountains which have nothing but food for bees, but they had trees not very long ago, and the rafters from those felled there to roof the largest buildings are still sound.

There are many more books and speeches and documents beside these that are available today to further discuss humanity's influence on the environment. Except for the fact that we now have better information thanks to the concerted efforts of modern science and the many tireless individuals that study the effects of humans on the environment, I'm not telling you a story much different than these.

The principal difference here is that I've approached telling this story as an engineer would approach a challenge. "Tell me what I have to do and I'll make it work" might well be the call cry of engineers. This document is thus set out as a resource and an open document for other people to critique and improve until we can specify the task for engineers. Once we know what we have to do, we will certainly do it.

This document started out as a very cold and impersonal look at the physics, and the thermodynamics of Earth's energy systems. It was clearly apparent that while audiences enjoyed that conversation and it provided valuable perspective, the numbers were too large, and the issues so impersonal, that it was difficult to understand the implications.

In an effort to remedy that this document now has two stories intertwined: The larger, global energy picture, and the more personal energy accounting for all of earth's individuals. The larger story is about very big numbers and very big implications. The personal story is about each of us living and working in this shared planet, and the cumulative effects that each of our lives make.

I remember first watching Al Gore give a tremendous, and important, presentation at a conference with his climate change talk. The immediate questions from that audience were "How does this effect me?" and "What can I do to make a difference?". A few years later the answers to these questions ended up in the credits of his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth". Because the answers to those questions are the only way we as individuals can understand our global challenge, we have tried to bring them into the center of this conversation rather than the appendix. This isn't meant as a gross criticism of Gore, just that I personally want a deeper understanding of the consequences, and to know what to do.

Without doubt, the only way to move forward is to know what the target is, know how to measure progress towards that target, and have the data and information to make good personal decisions as well as good global decisions.

Each of the following steps will be addressed at greater length in its own post:

Step 1 CO2 = Climate
Understand the link between CO2 concentration and climate change. Understand the models, their predictive power, their accuracy.

In laying out the logic of this document we hope to give you the tools to rebuild this story as it relates to you. If you disagree with any specific assumption or piece of information, you have the approach outlined here to return to.

If you believe global warming isn’t happening at all, this logic is still valid for you. You will merely conclude that nothing needs to be done immediately, and you will walk away with a greater understanding of your own energy consumption, ways to save money, and ways to increase the security of energy supplies as fossil fuel supplies slowly dwindle.

If you believe that we should return to pre-industrial levels of CO2 this story is still valid - you will reach more drastic conclusions about the urgency of action, and the things we must start to do. The real point here is that this is an approach which really lays out climate change for what it is. A collective choice for humanity. A choice that determines the aesthetics of our future planet, the way we live, breathe, work, eat, and play.

The first step in the problem is understanding the relationship between greenhouse gases (principally CO2) and climate change. This is very well studied and the IPCC has been at the forefront of collecting and vetting this information for humanity. The other goal of laying out the logic this simply is to push the conversation forward for climate change. It is going to have to come down to a choice, where we set a real goal - not a diluted percentage of industrial output goal like the Kyoto goal - but a global CO2 concentration and emissions goal and consequent clean energy production goals. People will do what they need to do once they have a goal in place. We all love challenges.

Step 2 Temperature Choice
Choose the temperature at which you would like to stabilize the earth. Acknowledge the implications of your choice.

As we increase CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, the temperature rises. By halting or reversing the rate at which we emit CO2 to the atmosphere we are in effect choosing the CO2 concentration that the atmosphere will eventually stabilize at. This concentration determines the temperature that the world will stabilize at. The idea is that once you have an understanding of the relationship between CO2 and temperature (with all of its uncertainties) you can make a choice of what temperature you would like to live at, and what effects that has on the environment.

This is a choice that nobody seems to want to make. No one wants to be wrong. No government wants to say "3 degrees more heat is OK", and then find out that it isn't. It's hard not to conclude that the safe and sane choice is the conservative one. Act now, and if we over-estimated the threats and consequences then the next generations can change our estimates and resource use because they will know more than we do now.

Step 2: Choosing a global temperature target.
This choice of temperature is obviously going to be the most difficult choice humanity has ever made.

The first time I publicly gave this talk it was at a technology conference for the programmer / hacker community. The temptation was to say that "Earth's climate is humanity's operating system" and that "what temperature we choose determines what functional calls we have, how stable the platform is, and what chances there are that we crash the OS and have to reboot". That mightn't be the best metaphor for general audiences, but the point of bringing it up here is we need to find the metaphors for every audience. Everyone needs to develop an intuition for what this means to us all.

One principal reason the temperature choice will be difficult is that at different temperatures you have a different set of winners and losers. This is probably only true for small temperature changes where the argument is about how this wine producing region increased in productivity while this rainforest dries out. At larger temperature changes, like those beyond +2 degrees Celsius, I think there is a compelling argument that no one wins. The world changes so much and the struggle for resources for survival will become so great, that no one can hide, and no one wins.

Step 3 Allowable Carbon
Determine from your choice of climate change the amount of carbon you are allowed to release into the atmosphere annually.

Having chosen a temperature, we can infer what CO2 concentration we should aim at for creating equilibrium on the planet. This is a number measured in parts per million (ppm) of CO2. This talk largely ignores the other green-house gases of CH4 and NO2, methane and nitrous oxide respectively. Methane is produced in large quantities by our livestock (sheep and cows in particular) and our landfills, as well as natural sources. Nitrous oxide is a by-product of our nitrogenous fertilizers for agriculture and produced in air travel through the jet-fuel combustion process. The concentrations of these gases is sometimes measured as CO2 equivalent. Methane per molecule is a 21 times more absorbing greenhouse molecule than CO2. Nitrous oxide is even worse, with an effect 310 times that of CO2. Obviously we need to address all of the molecules that contribute to climate change, and work to reduce the concentrations of all of them. This conversation will however focus just on CO2. I'm assuming that if we develop the awareness of climate implied by this document, that will happen in parallel to our focus on the largest contributor, CO2.

Carbon has an atomic weight of 12. Oxygen has an atomic weight of 16. Each time you combust, or burn, a carbon molecule, it is oxidized to become CO2. Some people measure carbon input into the atmosphere in terms of C, others in terms of CO2. To convert between these values multiple Carbon by 3.67, or divide CO2 by 3.67.

C : C02 = 12 : (12 + 16 + 16 ) = 44 hence 44/12 = 3.67.

Step 4 Useable Fossil Energy
Determine from the amount of carbon you can release to the atmosphere the amount of energy available to us from fossil fuels and carbon emitting sources and therefore what “new clean power component we need to generate.

Knowing the concentration we wish to stabilize at, we know how much power we can make burning carbon based fuels, over what time frame we need to reduce it, and to what ultimate value. This is an extremely important number to determine because it sets us our target of how much non-carbon power we will need to produce to support the lifestyles we want to live.

With these choices and their consequences, we can now understand the grand challenge of renewable (or non-carbon emitting) energy, or indeed whether it is a challenge at all.

My personal interpretation of the information laid out here is that this is the biggest engineering challenge ever faced by mankind. That barely implies that it is also the biggest social, economic and political challenge in history!. I personally would conclude that you should support a concerted effort to meet this challenge in every way possible whilst also learning to live your personal life in healthier and happier ways.

Every choice you make is important here: your choice of how much climate change you can tolerate; your choice of lifestyle and the power generation it implies.

The other intent of laying out this logical framework and making this an open document is that this story needs to be told in different ways by different people in order to tell the story as far and wide as possible. The wisdom of many eyes on this document interpreting it in better ways will surely help humanity face and conquer this challenge. - This is after all about our collective choice, not the choice of any single player in the game. The coal companies get their vote, the environmentalists get their vote, middle Americans get their vote, Indian peasants get their vote. It's everyone's climate. Thats what we have to realize. It's everyone's climate. It's everyone's choice.

Step 5 Clean Energy Sources
Analyse from what sources we can possibly make the clean power component

This step allows us to know where all of the earth's energy resources are, how they can be tapped, and what we can expect of each of them. Even which secondary effects each of those choices might have: how much land area we devote to this or that, or what ecosystem effects solar panels and wind farms have. The important thing here is to know what the possibilities are and to inform wise investment choices in the potential of each one.

Finally we get to the really fun part. This is where the challenge turns to engineering. This is where we get our hands dirty, put our shoulders to the grindstone, and solve the problem.

Step 6 New Energy Mix
Choose a mix of technologies to make “the clean power component” and estimate the industrial and engineering effort to meet the challenge.

Pick your new energy mix, how much wind, how much solar, how much coal, how much gas, how much petroleum, how much nuclear, how much wave, how much tidal, how much geothermal. Once picked we are only a bunch of good new jobs and fulfilling work-days away from meeting our challenge.

"The sun pays all the bills"
- Kim Stanley Robinson.

The personal side of the story:
where does your energy go?

Step 1 My Lifestyle
Calculate my own current energy consumption as a result of my lifestyle.

Step 2 Carbon Calculators
Compare to other people’s “Carbon Calculators”

Step 3 My Share & Energy Demographics
Make it personal: give everyone an equal share of the current total energy resource. Compare my equal share to world’s current demographics.

Step 4 My New Life
Re Evaluate my own personal footprint to see what impact an equal share would have on my lifestyle.

The personal side of the story: Step 1.

Step 1 My Lifestyle
Calculate my own current energy consumption as a result of my lifestyle.

No one is exactly like anyone else. That’s part of why it is fun to be human. We all live in different ways. How we live determines the impact we each have on the environment. In recent times this has led to a public conversation about “Carbon Footprint”. I personally prefer to think about it as your own personal power requirement. Carbon and power are like the chicken and the egg. It is hard to figure out which came first and which one we should think in.

I am definitely unusual. As I write this I am a 34 year old scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur living in California. I have my own company that is trying to invent new ways of harnessing renewable power sources. I live in ‘the Mission’, a small yet colorful district in the city of San Francisco. I rent a small stand-alone house with two bedrooms that I share with my partner. I fly a lot, both for business and pleasure, and generally those trips are combined. I don’t drive very much, and when I do it is mostly in a very efficient Hybrid, or a reasonably efficient vintage VW beetle. I am an omnivore - I eat meat - regularly. I try to commute by bicycle and public ferry most days. I like to think of myself as environmentally aware and as motivated to building a better future for the planet. In spite of all these things, preparing this document has shown me that I am a major part of the energy problem. I don’t buy as many things as most other people, but the things I do buy (like lap-tops and cell phones) are particular energy intensive products.

I have a strong background in mathematics and physics and engineering and a PhD from MIT to show for it. Even with that I find it very difficult to calculate my own ecological footprint to the accuracy I would like, and during the analysis I found myself repeatedly stumbled for lack of information. I am sure it is hard for everyone. I have every modern resource available and I still find this whole issue extremely challenging to understand and deal with.

By calculating in detail my own energy consumption I hope to make more people aware of their own personal environmental impacts. I hope also to induce an improvement in the reporting
of personal environmental impact by the companies that provide us with our material goods.

Step 2 Carbon Calculators
Compare to other people’s “Carbon Calculators”

By now nearly everyone is aware of the concept of a "Carbon Calculator". There are many freely available on the web. Critiques of the system already get air-time in the press. I will compare a large set of them here to see how they compare using the same data I used myself. The bad news : the results are more variable than they are accurate. Why would I want to show this? If these are going to be the principle tools for the average person to figure out their progress in helping the world, then let's make them precise, and accurate. As all engineers know (and athletes!), you can only improve if you measure well and if you have benchmarks.

Step 3 My Share & Energy Demographics
Make it personal: give everyone an equal share of the current total energy resource. Compare my equal share to world’s current demographics.

It's worth here looking at the demographics of humanity's energy use, and the way our collective behaviour is the contributor. I include this quick study of demographics not to point the finger at any country in particular, but to put things in perspective, to help plan the future. We have to remember that our lifestyles and cultures changed and went in these directions before we knew a lot about climate change and the relationship with personal consumption. Rather than have Europeans thumb their noses at Americans and say "Look how much better we are" it would be hoped everyone says "OK, here we are, how do we all improve"... "what do you know that can help me improve, what do I know that can help you". The thing about living on the same planet tied together with the same atmosphere is that we can't simply ignore our neighbors.
We are all in it together.

Step 4 My New Life
Re-Evaluate my own personal footprint to see what impact an equal share would have on my lifestyle.

I found it very powerful to look at the global power consumption,
and the global population, and determine the average global power consumption per person. I then used this number to re-evaluate my life. Can I reduce my lifestyle to this average? Will it be hard? Easy? will it improve my life or make it less interesting? I'd recommend everyone go through this exercise and make your own choices: it helps you think about what is important to you. I still choose some portion of international travel because my family lives overseas. You might not. What really surprised me is that my new life actually looks a lot better for my health. I can also imagine that it will really improve the quality of my life. People will call me an optimist. I am!

I'm not trying to imply that equal distribution of the earth's energy resources is the right solution, I'm merely using it as a starting point for perspective. It certainly can't hurt to use this as your target.

Science and the scientific method.

Science is interesting. In modern day life we are bombarded with scientific study headlines. "Study shows (insert bizarre phenomena and conclusion)." Because of this, the public might be forgiven for becoming complacent to, or inoculated against, the latest "scientific" finding. Next week's study will likely contradict this week's. In part this is because the modern media does a fairly poor job of communicating science, and mostly because it tries to "dumb it down" or "sensationalize" it. I think the majority of the problem is that there isn't a wide understanding of the difference between "science" and "the scientific method".

Science is the study of some sort of phenomena accompanied by an effort to explain it with a theory. Because of this, great skepticism does and should meet any single scientific study. That skepticism by the rest of the scientific community is really what the "scientific method" is. As a scientist you are obliged to question every assumption and conclusion, and to test and retest them until an established truth emerges. With enough time, and enough questioning, we can build a lot of confidence that the theories are correct. This has been a proven method for generating the incredible amount of knowledge that humanity taps to construct modern life.

This method is particularly easy for easily measurable things like the mass of a neutron or the size of the moon, or for the motions of the planets. More recently it has gotten harder because the complexity of the things that we study has greatly increased. In biology it is very difficult to reach simple conclusions and knowledge because the entire system is so complex and interconnected. This is also true of climate change. The earth's climate is not completely understood. That is true and will likely always remain true. In the science of complex systems we build models. These models explain large data sets by simplifying the problem for us. We can test these models by measuring reality and comparing it with our models. It takes quite a long time to draw strong conclusions, but in the end, through the scientific method, we can have high confidence that the conclusions are generally correct, even if we do not know the exact details.

At right is a paper by Arrhenius, a great scientist of the late 19th century. He is most famous for the Arrhenius equation, but also studied the chemistry of our atmosphere. His study on "Carbonic Acid" (now referred to as CO2) is one of the earliest studies that links climate change with CO2 in the atmosphere.

A century later the scientific method has concluded with great confidence that our CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions are heating our world and endangering our lifestyles and the future of our children. While it remains wise to continue to doubt the headlines of each new "scientific study" it would be very unwise indeed to ignore the results of the collective wisdom of thousands of scientists working together through the scientific method. The conclusion now reached is that our behavior with regards to how we produce our energy and therefore generate CO2, must change. And now.

(Thanks to Worldchanging New Zealand columnist Craig Neilson for his assistance!)

How to Become Energy Literate and Battle Climate Change is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 8:57 AM)

Zero Impact Within Our Lifetimes

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:43:47 +0000

This article was written by Alex Steffen in January 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

The time has come to reconcile ourselves with a fundamental truth. Most of us were already alive when humanity went into overshoot and (sometime in the late 80's) began using up the planet faster than the planet could replenish itself. And many of us will still be alive, when, by mid-century at the latest, we have returned again to being a sustainable, one-planet civilization.

Of course, we may prove ourselves to be an evil and criminally shortsighted generation. We may melt the 'caps, log the Congo, burn the Amazon, slushie the tundra, acidify the ocean, drive half of all life into extinction and needlessly cause the deaths of billions of our fellow human beings. But I don't think we will. I think enough of us are better than that, braver than that and bolder than that.

Which means that we have to stop pussy-footing around and speak plainly: our goal is to have zero impact within our lifetimes. Our goal is to provide reasonable affluence and high qualities of life for everyone of the planet, while reducing our CO2 emissions, toxic releases, ecosystem impacts and resource draw-downs to essentially nothing, because anything more than zero is wrong.

Put more precisely, any ecological impact beyond global biocapacity tends to undermine Earth' natural systems, destroy ecosystem services and climate stability and ultimately destroy the options of our descendants. Worse yet, we are beginning to understand that more and more unsustainably intensive uses of the Earth bring increasing risks of passing catastrophic tipping points, and, indeed, that those tipping points may be closer than we think. These effects, and the risks they bring, are largely cumulative. With all of this in mind, it ought to be our goal to have no impact -- to bring our ecological footprint below biocapacity, perhaps even to start healing the planet (to change our ecological footprint into an ecological handprint -- as soon as possible.

The idea of zero impact ought to be non-contraversial. It is simple common sense that practices which are unsustainable cannot continue, and we know that it is true that propping up unsustainable practices with non-renewable resources has even more dramatic consequences. And we are currently growing rapidly less sustainable, and using more and more non-renewable to keep the ecological consequences at bay. This must stop. All of this is just plain speaking, and ought to be obvious to any informed observer.

What is less obvious, even to those who think about these issues a lot, is how quickly this must stop. When do we need to arrive at zero?

The answer, more and more clearly, boils down to now.

Take climate. Just today the Washington Post reported on two major recent studies which both concluded that zero energy emissions ought to be our goal by mid-century:

Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.
Using advanced computer models to factor in deep-sea warming and other aspects of the carbon cycle that naturally creates and removes carbon dioxide (CO2), the scientists, from countries including the United States, Canada and Germany, are delivering a simple message: The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.

"The question is, what if we don't want the Earth to warm anymore?" asked Carnegie Institution senior scientist Ken Caldeira, co-author of a paper published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. "The answer implies a much more radical change to our energy system than people are thinking about."

Expect, in the next few years, to see a lot more reports like these from nearly every field. Most of the smart scientists and researchers I know expect both scientific modeling and scientific moxie to converge on much more plain-spoken assessments of our need for radical change in the ways we're treating the planet.

Some people fear that telling people the truth will result in a loss of our credibility or a despairing retreat from action. I don't think that's right or true. I think our job is to tell the truth, help people come to grips with it, and help them imagine how their worlds could improve as we solve these problems.

Bargaining with the universe is a pretty universal human reaction to bad news. Even those of us who have no belief in the supernatural tend to drop into a pleading negotiation with some unseen power when the doctor walks in with a grim look on her face.

It's pretty easy to look at humanity's reaction to the environmental crisis from this light. We can already see people coming to grips with the diagnosis. We ought to encourage a rapid ratcheting down of our denial reactions as we all come to peace with the reality that everything needs to change, and set our resolve to change it.

We'd all better hope it happens soon. The longer we wait, the tighter the window, of course; but there's also a lot more upside to be had if we act quickly. And I think the upside of a zero footprint civilization is what we really ought to be focusing on here.

I, for one, do not believe that we must be worse off for this transition. Under most models, the economy will continue strong growth even if we push hard on reducing emissions -- indeed, many of the things we need to do will actually improve productivity, more than paying for themselves. (This is true, by the way, not just for carbon emissions, but for toxics, waste reduction, water conservation, ecosystem service preservation, greater access to education and health care and host of other sustainability priorities). On pure GDP terms, making this transition quickly may be a huge winner.

And, of course, GDP isn't everything. There are a whole host of human security, moral happiness and quality of life questions that tackling this crisis will help us answer. If we move quickly, we could not only have staved off disaster by mid-century, but built a profoundly better world. And that is far more than nothing.

But to get there, we have to be honest about the goal of having no impact at all. We have to be willing to stand up, in public, and say the words: zero, now.

(Image: All the world's water, all the world's air. Internet flotsam of unknown origin)

Zero, Now. is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 8:43 AM)

Social Software, Digital Activism and Cute Cats

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:32:50 +0000

This article was written by Alex Steffen in February 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Ethan's talk at ETech was one of my favorite parts of this year's conference. He wrote it up on his excellent personal blog, My Heart's In Accra. I think Worldchanging readers will find it funny, smart and useful. K thx bye! --Alex

I’d forgotten just how much fun ETech is. Not only are the talks some of the most creative and innovative you can hear in the tech community, the room full of people is one of the most congenial, smart and funny you’re likely to encounter anywhere. Tim O’Reilly won’t come out and say that it’s his favorite conference, but he’s willing to declare it the most important that his organization puts on.

I was only able to be in San Diego for one of the days of the conference - long enough to catch several excellent talks, but briefly enough that I’m relying on Ryan Singel of Wired to catch talks that I’m very sorry to miss: Larry Lessig’s plans to change congress; Quinn Norton, who’s now thinking about hacking her brain as well as her body; Joel Selanikio’s celebration of the mobile phone as a tool for transforming Africa.

Singel did an excellent job with my talk as well, The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism. I was grateful to have the excuse to explore at more length some of the ideas I’ve been writing about for the past year, and was gratified that the talk was well received. There were several requests for me to post the slides - that’s not really realistic, as they were 100MB and rather video-rich - what I’m going to do instead is post my notes, a bunch of links and a few of the slides. This won’t be an accurate picture of what I said - it’s more likely to be a picture of what I meant to say.

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.

Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

I had a front-row seat for this transition, working with Tripod. We sincerely believed that the purpose of the web was to give college graduates helpful information about renting apartments, applying for jobs and investing their money. Our users rapidly told us that what the web was really about was publishing their own information… which left us with the difficult challenge of figuring out how to make money off of people’s collections of cat pictures.

User-generated content, on average, is a lot less interesting than professional content. But there are a lot more people creating their own content for fun than those doing so for a living, and in aggregate, that content is at least as interesting.

Based on my Tripod experience, I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media - it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test - if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.

In late 1996, we noticed that Tripod was receiving a great deal of traffic from Malaysia. Searching through the server logs, we found lots of pages in Bahasa Malay talking about “Reformasi” and “Anwar Ibrahim”. I had to visit the Political Science department at Williams College to figure out that we were apparently hosting much of the Malaysian opposition political movement, dedicated to helping deposed and imprisoned deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim return to power. Malaysian media was largely closed to opposition voices, but investment in internet infrastructure meant that the opposition was able to access the internet and publish material that couldn’t be disseminated any other way. (Several of these pages still exist on Tripod.)

A more economically rational company would have likely removed the Malaysian content, as we had no way of selling ads to Malaysian advertisers. Economic rationality was never Tripod’s strong suit, and we ended up sponsoring Malaysia’s olympic team instead. (They took the silver in Men’s team badmitton.)

With web 2.0, we’ve embarced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do. as a result, we’re creating a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful for activists. There are twin revolutions going on - the ease of creating content and the ease of sharing it with local and global audiences.

There’s been understandable excitement about use of online video by the Obama campaign. I was in Doha, Qatar, when Larry Lessig showed the above video as an example of the way that remix culture could reinvigorate American political culture. Others have pointed to the video as an example of “user-generated swiftboating“, and the potential for amateur nastiness to be even more evil than our debased professional political culture.

I was sitting next to Tunisian activist Sami ben Gharbia at the meeting in Doha, and he nudged me, saying, “We did this years ago in Tunisia.” I thought he meant the idea of using video to motivate voters. Actually, he meant that Tunisian activists - specifically a friend of his who works under the name “Astrubal” had remixed the 1984 Apple ad for political ends. (See my post “Democrats Invent the Remix, only three years after the Tunisians” for more on this story.)

In the Tunisian video, the guy on the screen is Ben Ali, a major opponent of free speech and a long-serving dictator. No matter how negatively you feel about Hillary, he’s a more Orwellian figure, in part because he’s so skilled at PR. Tunisia is more repressive than many of its Middle Eastern neighbors, but it enjoys widespread tourism and was selected - absurdly - to host the World Summit on the Information Society conference in November 2005. (For more on this absurdity, you may want to refer to my posts from WSIS, perhaps starting with this one.) Because Ben Ali is so good at PR, Sami, Astrubal and others see themselves as an ad agency, making videos designed to embarass the government on an international scale.

One of the most amazing of these videos features the peregrinations of the Tunisian presidential aircraft. You wouldn’t expect to see this jet in Europe very often, as Ben Ali is famous for rarely leaving the country. But Sami and Astrubal used planespotter sites - sites like Airliners.net that allow amateur plane enthusiasts to post their photos - to determine that the President’s jet travels a whole lot more than he does. They used footage from Google Earth and pictures from the plane spotter sites to make a video that shows the power of the participatory web at its best.

Their video raises all sorts of ethical questions - is it permissable for the country’s first lady to take the Presidential jet, fueled and crewed on taxpayer dollars, for shopping junkets in Europe? Foreign Policy magazine didn’t think so, and ran an article critiquing the first lady. They also published instructions on how you, too, can become a presidential planespotter.

Sami and Astrubal posted the video on their personal blogs… but as known activists, their blogs have been blocked in Tunisia for years. They also posted it on DailyMotion, a video site popular in the French-speaking world. Shortly after, the Tunisian government blocked access to DailyMotion.

This is a good thing if you’re an activist. Most Tunisians don’t identify as activists and might not be engaged with politics. But, like Americans and Europeans, they’re interested in seeing cute cats being adorable online. When the government blocks DailyMotion, it impacts a much wider swath of Tunisians than those who are politicially active. Cute cats are collateral damage when governments block sites. And even those who could care less about presidential shenanigans are made aware that their government fears online speech so much that they’re willing to censor the millions of banal videos on DailyMotion to block a few political ones.

Blocking banal content on the internet is a self-defeating proposition. It teaches people how to become dissidents - they learn to find and use anonymous proxies, which happens to be a key first step in learning how to blog anonymously. Every time you force a government to block a web 2.0 site - cutting off people’s access to cute cats - you spend political capital. Our job as online advocates is to raise that cost of censorship as high as possible.

So why don’t governments block only he offensive speech? Why would governments be stupid enough to close off these tools entirely? It’s a reasonable question and one that’s an active research topic. One answer is that it’s surprisingly difficult to censor the web well. (Pakistan’s recent shutdown of YouTube shows one remarkably stupid and dangerous way to screw up and overblock web traffic.)

If you want to prevent your users from accessing online content, you’ve got four basic options. You can block keywords, block URLs, pollute your DNS or block IPs. It’s surprisingly hard to block keywords - you need to open and examine all the packets crossing your network. China does a bit of this, but mostly blocks keywords within URLs - it’s prohibitively expensive to examine every packet for an entire nation and check against a blocklist. URL blocking simply doesn’t work very well - it’s easy to rewrite a URL and access the same content. DNS blocking is very simple, but it tends to backfire - your smarter users simply switch towards using an unpolluted DNS and you have no way to control their behavior with this technique in the future. And so, most repressive governments block IPs, which limits access to banal as well as sensitive content.

But perhaps this isn’t stupidity on the part of nations. When Pakistan blocks YouTube, it limits traffic to the site. Google notices these sorts of things. Perhaps it’s coincidental that the video named by Pakistan has been removed from YouTube due to a terms of service violation - perhaps not. But while advocates try to raise the price of censorship for governments, smart governments are raising the price for noncompliance for Web 2.0 companies.

My colleagues at the Open Net Initiative began documenting net censorship a bit more than five years ago. At that point, Saudi Arabia and China were censoring widely. Now at least two dozen nations censor the net regularly, and more may be participating in “event-based filtering”, blocking access to political sites before a key election, for instance. My fear, in the medium to long term, is that every nation that constrains freedom of the press will begin filtering the net, realizing that the Internet is where important press takes place these days.

Of course, the activists win sometimes too. When Google Maps became accessible in Bahrain, it let Bahrani activists answer a pressing question in that small, crowded nation - who owns all the land? From the air, it becomes pretty clear that large chunks of the nation are reserved for palaces owned by the royal family.

An anonymous Bahrani activist thought this was pretty interesting, and made a PDF document of screen captures from Google Maps, enhanced with notes comparing crowded communities with spacious palaces. The document flew around the country from mailbox to mailbox. The Bahrani authorities couldn’t block the file - it’s a PDF, and blocking PDFs has nasty consequences for businesspeople. So they blocked Google Maps, which got bloggers like noted free speech advocate Mahmood Al-Youssif up in arms. After a brief block, they simply gave up and let citizens see the site, rather than letting Mahmood and others train people to use proxy sites. (More on this story is available on my blog.)

When governments really want to shut people up, they don’t just block them, they imprison them. Egypt has blocked very few websites - the Muslim Brotherhood site gets blocked occasionally, but most are uncensored. But they’ve jailed Kareem Soliman for his critical remarks about Islam, and they haven’t hesitated to arrest protesters seeking political reform.

This, in turn, has been known to backfire. When Kefaya activist and open-source proponent Alaa Abdel Fateh was one of 700 activists arrested at a protest supporting the independence of the Egyptian judiciary, it was hard for government authorities to know that they were about to have a PR crisis on their hands. Alaa began blogging from prison, passing notes to his wife, Manal, who jointly maintains their blog. These blog posts helped attract international attention to the case, which meant that camera crews from Al Jazeera and CNN covered a situation they normally would have ignored. It probably meant that Alaa spent much more time in jail than he otherwise would have, but it also may have meant that he was safer than if he’d been anonymous in prison.

(A piece of advice I offer at this point in many talks - if you’re planning on being an online activist, marry a blogger. It’s worked very well for me.)

The imprisonment of bloggers has taught activists some interesting lessons about advocacy in the era of Web 2.0. When Global Voices China editor Hao Wu was arrested and detained in Beijing, I and other GV friends wanted to go online immediately and advocate for his release. But that’s not the right way to do things - you’ve got to get permission from the detained person’s family first. And it took Rebecca MacKinnon a month of phonecalls to get his sister, Nina Wu, to agree to let us advocate on Hao’s behalf.

More importantly, Nina began blogging herself. Unsurprisingly, she knew a lot more about her brother than we did, and she wrote much more movingly than we could. Eventually, our campaign focused on translating her posts from Chinese to English and disseminating them as widely as possible. My conclusion from this: good advice for the advocate in a web 2.0 age - “Don’t speak. Point.” (Bruno Giussani explains what I mean by that phrase far more eloquently than I ever have.)

Nina wasn’t a professional activist. She was a successful career woman, a young mother, living the Chinese dream in Shanghai. She became an activist because she was forced to and she reached out for the tools she had access to - which hapened to be MSN spaces. MSN is heavily censored in China - it’s certainly not what we would have chosen for her. But you don’t get to choose the tools - activists use what’s at hand. It’s fine to build tools for activists, but even better to build tools for folks who don’t know they’re activists yet.

(In making this point, I should be very, very careful to point out that I have deep respect for tools that have been developed successfully for activist uses, tools like Martus or FrontlineSMS. My point is simply that there are huge numbers of web users who don’t yet think of themselves as activists who are likely to reach for the tools they have at hand, not to look specifically for tools designed for activists.)

Most activists discover they’re much more effective out of jail. It’s possible that bulk SMS tools - especially Twitter - might be useful in keeping activists out of jail. Alaa now uses Twitter to report on his political activities - this gives friends watching his feed the possibility of relauching the FreeAlaa site, should we see his note that he’s going in to talk to the police, and there’s no message letting us know he’s out of the police station afterwards. (Alaa tells me that tons of people are now subscribing to his Twitter feed and that they should back off because it’s a very boring time right now in Egyptian politics… :-)

Kefaya activists were able to use mobile phone messages, some sent through Twitter, to alert activists to the impending arrest of Malek Moustafa. As activist came to the place where Moustafa was being taken into custody, they attracted a huge crowd of police, who effectively blocked the street and prevented the police car with Moustafa from leaving the street. He was eventually released. Corresponding with Alaa about the situation, he raises questions of whether this was really a victory for Twitter - this is something Egyptian activists have done with SMS for a long time. Twitter may simply be useful in confusing Egyptian authorities, who might choose to block local SMS in a crisis, but might not consider blocking an international SMS number.

Twitter is also becoming more useful in crisis reporting. Veni Markovski used a Twitter feed to report live on events in Belgrade after Kosovo declared independence; Juliana Rotich has used her feed to report live from Eldoret during post-election violence. And mobile phones are allowing people to report incidents in Kenya and include them within the map on Ushahidi.

Twitter is far from the perfect tool - it’s centralized and easily blocked. But it’s also used for lots of dumb purposes, which means it passes the cute cats test. Lots of the tools that have become most useful to activists have characteristics that un-recommend them for activist uses. Facebook, which has helped organize major protests against the FARC in Colombia, is notoriously bad about letting users pull data out of the system. Imran Jamal spoke about the challenge of trying to move a community of 400,000 users from Facebook to Avaaz, so they could fundraise more easily. (See “Pros and Cons of Facebook Activist“.) One challenge for activists using Web2.0 tools is figuring out when it’s time to get real and get onto dedicated platforms.

What happens when governments begin taking Web2.0 activism seriously? A funny example comes from Belarus. Belarussian leader Alexander Lukashenko noticed that YouTube was beginning to carry a wealth of anti-Lukashenko content, and suggested the Belarussian government might build it’s own YouTube competitor. Belarussian bloggers went one better and built LuNet, a set of parody sites designed to represent a Lukashenko-compliant read/write web. Perhaps the best of the sites was a Google parody - most searches resulted in a page telling you that the KGB was on lunch break and asking you to try again later when they could watch what you were doing. (See Global Voices Advocacy coverage of the story.)

More competent regimes have managed to exert significantly more control. China filters the internet more effectively than any other nation, using a combination of keyword filters, IP blocks and some DNS fiddling. The system is extremely complicated, involving filtering at a national boundary level and throughout the network, with some blocking taking place deep within the national network. China uses some techniques not widely seen elsewhere, including sending RSET packets when certain keywords are detected to knock users offline.

But that’s not the sinister part. Effective as the Great Firewall may be (and, actually, it’s not that effective - lots of dissidents get around it using various proxy techniques), the most relevant Chinese censorship takes place within Chinese Web 2.0 companies - including US companies operating servers in China. There’s an incredible wealth of Web 2.0 startups in China. These companies allow Chinese users to share video, post photos and write blogs. They’re much more useful to the average Chinese user as the tools and content are in Chinese, not English. And, unlike most popular web 2.0 tools, they’re not blocked in China.

And they’ve got censorship baked in. The above image is from research conducted by my colleage Rebecca MacKinnon. She discovered that MSN Spaces, Microsoft’s Chinese-localized and Chinese-hosted service prevented her from putting the terms “democracy” or “human rights” in the title of her blog. According to a report published by RSF, the heads of web companies meet weekly with censors who instruct them on what keywords to block, allowing the system to be extremely flexible and adaptable.

Some Chinese bloggers have responded by being extremely creative in their use of images. Some Chinese bloggers began posting images of river crabs on their blogs. The joke is that the term for “river crab” sounds very similar to the word “harmonize”, a term that had become slang for “censored” - “My blog just got harmonized.” The term “harmonized” became so popular that it became blocked. So Chinese bloggers began to refer to their blogs as having been “river crabbed”. The watches are a pun on “the three represents“, a political philosophy put forward by Jiang Zemin. This is also a commonly blocked term, so has been rewritten as “wears three watches”… which explains the oddly dressed river crab.

Here’s the thing - for the vast majority of Chinese internet users, they’re encountering a much more free information environment than their parents experienced. Michael Anti argues that Chinese society is much freer than the US in terms of personal behavior, especially around premarital sex and homosexuality. The vast majority of young Chinese are enjoying these personal freedoms and are willing to accept a world in which political freedom is somewhat constrained.

China’s censorship genius is that they’ve found a way to let people have their cute cats and have censorship as well. While China will block sites like Human Rights Watch, they won’t block domestic Web 2.0 sites, and hence the collateral damage from blocking banal content doesn’t draw non-activists to become aware of activist issues. Is this unique to China, or will we see this technique spread? It’s hard to imagine Ethiopia, for instance, being capable of building their own Amharic internet applications and blocking all Web 2.0 tools.

It’s also interesting to see what tools China won’t block. GMail, thus far, has remained unblocked - Anti theorizes that it’s popular with the communist party. Skype is unblocked, and it has some intriguing holes in it - Skype voice chatrooms are tailor-made to serve as pirate radio stations. Pipe a podcast into a chat room and you’re broadcasting audio via an encrypted system to users around the world. And China’s unlikely to block MMOGs, even if people periodically stand on hills inside games and shout out the IP addresses of proxy servers.

(Lots more on China and net censorship at “Cute Cat Theory: The China Corollary” and “Michael Anti and the end of the golden age of blogs in China“.)

It seems criminal to give a talk at the ancestral home of Lolgeeks and not talk about the brave and noble Lolcat. We did some informal research within the Global Voices community and discovered that, while our non-north American, non-European colleagues thought Lolcats were very funny, they simply didn’t exist within their own communities. (Trading funny pictures of animals was quite common, just not the leet-speak captioning.)

Our early attempts to propogate lolcats in other cultures have been largely unsuccessul. (That’s a lolcat by Rachel with our cat, Thorn, saying “Oh Hai”…) There’s a real challenge within the world of lolcats - making activism viral probably means making it funny as well as political and heart-wrenching. My single favorite comment on SUP’s acquisition of LiveJournal is a lolcat, which sums up the situation better than any angry post could have.

It’s typical to end these sorts of talks with a call to action, possibly a better one than “export lolcats to repressive nations”. If there’s a single message to the talk, it is that activists are going to use your tools if your tools are any good - watch them, pay attention to them, protect them and learn from them. They’ll make tour tools better, and they’re one of the reasons to make social software in the first place.

The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 5:32 PM)

Worldchanging Interview: HelioVolt CEO B.J. Stanbery

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:23:11 +0000

This article was written by Jon Lebkowsky in March 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Austin-based HelioVolt Corporation has raised over $100 million in investment capital to finance production of copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cells. While CIGS might be less efficient than crystalline silicon solar cells, they're also cheaper, and HelioVolt's investors are banking on the cost-effectiveness of its FASST^TM technology, which prints the CIGS coating directly onto a wide variety of substrates. This technology was developed by HelioVolt CEO B.J. Stanbery. I recently interviewed B.J. at his office in Austin.

Jon Lebkowsky: How did you get the idea that led you to form HelioVolt?

BJ Stanbery: It's really the fulfillment of a thirty year professional commitment. When I started graduate school at the University of Washington in 1978, I was not only struggling with getting all my homework done for graduate school physics, but I was also struggling with more philosophical issues around raison d'être. It was just after the first oil crisis, which started in '76, then '77 was the depths of it, and in '78 things started to recover, but slowly. The whole energy issue was very much on my mind as I was trying to figure out how to use my talents and my skills and my interests.

Like most people, I excel at the things I'm most interested in. I was very interested then in solid state physics, and I had been working, throughout my last year as an undergraduate at the University of Texas, at the Fusion Research Center, the Tokamak lab. I thought about doing plasma physics. But in looking at the fundamental difference between that kind of science, i.e. big science, and the opportunity to work with solar energy and photovoltaics, I found the latter much more appealing.

I felt I could be much more effective there as an individual contributor than on the area of solid state physics. This idea came to me as a consequence of a colloquium that was held by the physics department at the University of Washington, where the guest speaker was from Boeing. John Barton came and gave a talk about the solar power satellite, the SPS, which was the vision of making multi-square-mile collectors in space that would then microwave-beam the energy back down to earth to be collected in giant array fields of microwave antennas. That was a grand vision that I found very exciting. I had been trying to figure out how to get engaged in that field, and the week after John gave that talk, I called him up and asked him for a summer job. I had gotten more and more interested in solar energy.

In 1977, the U.S. Department of Energy had been formed, as the first new cabinet position in the executive branch of the U.S. government in decades, and the solar energy research institute, SERI, had been established. So I had decided that that was what I wanted to commit my career to, so I got a summer job in the summer of '78 with John Barton, and made my first solar cells that summer. That's where the dream started, and as a good scientist, and perhaps also just by nature, I tend to be a skeptic, so I felt very strongly that it didn't make sense to launch off into this kind of venture unless I really had a solution, so I spent a lot of time trying to understand the problem. Like most engineers, in the beginning, I thought the problem was technical. I started working on the kinds of things that engineers focus on, which is performance, and I made concentrator solar cells and all the different sorts of technologies, and by 1985, though we never published it until 1989, we established the world record in thin film solar cell efficiency, and held that record ever since.

Then I won a fellowship from the Boeing Company to MIT for several years, and was their outstanding engineer of the year in 1987. I wanted to do non-engineering things like project management and financial cost analysis, the kinds of things that make engineers dangerous. When I came back, they made me responsible for cost modeling for the technologies that we'd been developing. It was at that point I finally realized that the real problem, the real challenge of solar, was not performance, but cost-effective manufacturing. And that changed my career, when I finally did that analysis in 1990.

By that time I had figured out, from my point of view, a solution to the performance problem, and then we demonstrated that we could invoke a wide range of efficiencies, including the world record that we set, 25.8% conversion efficiency for a thin film dual junction cell. That's comparable to a combined cycle gas turbine. So at that point, in terms of thermodynamic efficiency, you can't really argue that solar's not good enough. You have to then focus on what I realized was the real problem, which was cost. At that point, I realized that I did not have in my professional toolbox the skill set required to develop or invent a new manufacturing process.
Because I was a physicist and a mathematician, I could model things well, I understood the device physics. In physics they teach you that thermodynamic functions are partial differentials of grand canonical partition functions, statistical mechanics, and that's not a very practical way to do almost any calculation in thermodynamics. So, in 1994, Boeing decided to get out of solar, and I decided to get out of Boeing. I went back to school, to the University of Florida to get a Ph.D., and I decided to get that in chemical engineering, since those are the kinds of skills that complemented what I already had in my toolbox, and that were necessary to invent a new chemical processing method for making these CIGS solar cells.

Jon Lebkowsky: Did that give you an insight also into storage?

BJ Stanbery: No. None whatsoever. All I know is that storage still costs too much, too.

Jon Lebkowsky: Isn't storage a significant issue or question mark - e.g. if you have many cloudy days?

BJ Stanbery: If you want to look at an ideal solution, the availability of cost-effective storage historically has driven the entire development of the industry. That would fundamentally change the utility industry, if we had cost-effective storage. Not just solar. So, in fact, what changed the market for solar dramatically was when people abandoned the notion that they needed to include storage in a system, and instead started creating developed inverter technology to take the DC electricity coming out of the photovoltaic devices, convert it into AC electricity, and then connect these systems to the grid, so that the grid then acted as a market, if you will - an exchange mechanism for the electricity. The explosion in the PV industry occurred when people abandoned the notion that PV had to be used with batteries to store the electricity.

Jon Lebkowsky: A PV unit that is installed on a house can be just a node on the grid, that's actually feeding industry back into the grid?

BJ Stanbery: When the home is using less than that system is creating, yes, it can. That also is a different kind of challenge to the utility infrastructure, because our utility infrastructure is based on a model of central power generation, and transmission and distribution back out to the buildings where most electricity is used. The widespread deployment of solar creates a far more distributed generation infrastructure, which creates some topological problems for the utility industry, if the smaller systems are not interfaced properly, and if appropriate technologies for managing large volumes of distributed power generation are not developed. And that is still an issue which has yet to be fully and appropriately addressed.

Jon Lebkowsky: There are transmission issues, aren't there? How to sustain transmission over something that is more like a network?

BJ Stanbery: That's sort of what I'm talking about, the transmission issues. It's really the generation management, and there are issues.

Jon Lebkowsky: What you're creating now is an alternative to grid-connected systems?

BJ Stanbery: No, I very much believe that the paradigm of the future is grid-connected systems, because it obviates the need for storage. If you sit around and wait for that industry to develop low-cost electrical storage before PV gets deployed broadly, I'm afraid you may be waiting a long time. It doesn't make sense, either.

Jon Lebkowsky: Somebody told me he thought the utilities were concerned that, to the extent that PV becomes more widespread in its use, that they can sell less, that people can go off-grid or consume less.

BJ Stanbery: I've heard that concern before, and I think it's overblown. Let me explain that. That doesn't mean that there aren't people in the utility industry that are worried about that. But I think they haven't thought it through yet. The issue of management of distributed power generation, of transmission and distribution, the one that you raised, is really more substantive when it becomes widely adopted. Let me be a little Socratic about this and ask you a question: why do utility companies include in their bill little inserts that offer to pay you to put in a thermostat or improve the energy-efficiency of your system, to subsidize a new furnace, a new hot water heater? Why would they do that? Those same things reduce demand for what they're selling?

Jon Lebkowsky: My assumption has always been that, since many utilities are public utilities, city-owned or city operated, that they put the citizen first, a citizen as opposed to a consumer. That they're not really trying to maximize their profit, but they're trying to create more of a public good. Am I way off base there?

BJ Stanbery: Noble, but perhaps a tad naïve. I have a different theory of why they do it. They actually made quite a study of it. They call it demand-side management. From their point of view, what they're actually trying to do is to avoid demand increasing at a rate that requires them to finance substantial investment in new infrastructure. They're avoiding having to go out, raise money, and invest it in new power plants - there's so much risk tied up in that, if you look at how long it takes, how much money it costs, how capital-intensive it is. It gets complicated because it's different regulated and non-regulated environments. In the regulated environments, historically the utility industry has been capped in the rate of return on equity that they can get, at a very low level, from regulators, and how much they can get for capital investment in generation capacity. A utility doesn't make much money off of doing that, whereas the regulators have always allowed them to pass on the cost of fuels to the consumers through a fuel surcharge. So they have a fixed and very low rate of return on investment and capital equipment, and they get to attach a profit margin onto increasing fuel costs. So guess what? Anything like solar that's all capital and no fuel doesn't in a regulated environment like that look very attractive to utility companies, which makes their stock look not so attractive on the equity markets. There's a number of things going on there, but I think with demand side management what they're trying to do is to avoid new capital investment, particularly nowadays. There's been kind of a bad history, for example, with nuclear power plants, people investing billions and billions in nuclear power plants. For example, in Washington state, they had a statewide bond fund, they had a couple of big nuclear power plants that they funded down the Columbia River. They built most of it, and then they stopped. The political environment changed, and they could no longer finish them and no longer operate them, and they never got their money. They defaulted on the bonds. So utility companies are kind of like elephants, they have a long memory, in that regard. So they tend to recognize that there's a lot of risk associated with major capital investment.

Jon Lebkowsky: James Lovelock recently said in a Rolling Stone interview that he thought we would inevitably have to turn to nuclear energy now. Do you agree with that? Do you think he's barking up the wrong tree, that we can proliferate solar generation to the extent that we wouldn't have to think so much about a nuclear alternative?

BJ Stanbery: I'm not dogmatic about there being only one solution. To the contrary, I think that we need a portfolio of solutions in order to possibly cope with the challenge ahead of us. My prediction is that the demand for energy is going to soar because of the incipient - and now well under way - development of highly populous countries, like India and China. The cost of energy is going to soar. So a lot of things that were uneconomical will become affordable. You see that already in the price of gas increasing… it's not over, is my best guess.

If you look at nuclear alone, there's a fascinating analysis that I recommend anyone who wants to be well-informed on this subject read, on the web site of Nathan Lewis of The Lewis Group at Cal Tech. He's a professor of chemistry there, National Academy of Sciences… he's made a hard core, scientific assessment of what energy sources are known to humanity that are available on the terawatt scale at which we consume power. Currently, humanity consumes about thirteen terawatts of power, in all forms, including food, fuels, electricity, everything: you name it. By 2012, I think his numbers were that we're going to need fifteen. And by 2050, I think we're going to need 28 terawatts.

Jon Lebkowsky: That's a factor of global development, an upscaling of lifestyles.

BJ Stanbery: And it even makes assumptions about improved conservation and improved efficiency. So it's not a wild-eyed, crazy estimate. The fact is that nuclear alone cannot solve this energy crisis. It can be an element in the portfolio of solutions that are required. But solar does not solve all the problems either, until we solve the cost-effective energy storage problem. Part of the reason is that it's not a fuel. If you look at Nate Lewis's website, there are really only six forms of power known to humanity that are available on the Terawatt scale. One of them is thermonuclear, but all we know how to do with that is blow things up, so it doesn't really count. I used to work on fusion research - that was thirty years ago, and they still haven't solved that one. Not saying they won't someday, but it doesn't look like it's around the corner. The other five include the usual suspects: coal, gas, oil; and then nuclear fission and solar. That's it, there's really only five that are applicable to solving this problem and increasing our resource. That's why I think that a portfolio solution is inevitable. Solar, in constrast to the other four, is not a fuel.

Jon Lebkowsky: How about geothermal, how would that figure in?

BJ Stanbery: Not available on a terawatt scale. There's not enough of it available.

Jon Lebkowsky: Would it have an appreciable impact?

BJ Stanbery: I recommend that you look at his data, and make your own assessment of that. I just think that he did a very legitimate job, a very hard-nosed, scientific assessment of it, instead of being political about it. So these are the numbers to work with, in my opinion.

When it comes to providing energy for transportation, that becomes, with our current infrastructure, a challenge, because solar is a very dilute source of energy, it's a kilowatt per square meter. There's a lot of it - a kilowatt per square meter over one square kilometer is a gigawatt of power, and on the illuminated half of the earth, that's 117,000 Terawatts continuously. So there's a huge amount of power, but it's very dilute.

Jon Lebkowsky: With solar power, your car would have to be really big and flat.

BJ Stanbery: Exactly! If you wanted to be anything other than what solar cars are now, which are glorified solar bicycles, really. Cars just don't cover enough area.

Jon Lebkowsky: Maybe you should just put a sail on your car.

BJ Stanbery: Probably, until the wind dies. Most people aren't willing to take that risk.
I don't think solar is a panacea. I do think that solar will be a continually larger and larger fraction, as we go forward through the centuries, but part of that is going to be from solving these ancillary problems, with low cost storage, and in the case of transportation systems, it also has to be lightweight.

There are other options. There are ways to use solar power to create fuels, and that may be a viable solution. One that I'm particularly fond of myself is methane as an energy source. It doesn't take as much energy as hydrogen to form, and maybe we can figure out a closed cycle solution to taking the carbon that we burn and turning it back into methane fuel. Methane is, after all, natural gas. So if we could use solar to recombine waste carbon to form synthetic natural gas, I can see a future where we would have potentially a closed cycle system, where the issue with carbon can be solved in terms of carbon dioxide in the air. But we shall have to see.

Jon Lebkowsky: You're building with FAAST technology. Did you originally plan to just license the technology and not manufacture it?

BJ Stanbery: No, I originally envisioned manufacturing and not licensing, and have never looked at a licensing model, because there's just too much value on the table, and too much investment required to develop a manufacturing technology.

Jon Lebkowsky: You're going to manufacture here?

BJ Stanbery: First factory, yes. Our intentions are to expand globally.

Jon Lebkowsky: How difficult has it been for you to gain acceptance for this idea as a viable business? Obviously, today, th ere is widespread acceptance, and Heliovolt is considered a leader, not just with this particular kind of technology and product, but also more generally a leader in clean energy business overall, in creating a credible environment for it. Did you have an uphill battle for acceptance, for a solar business.

BJ Stanbery: There's no question that, when I founded the company back in 2001, when I would pitch investors about investing in a solar company, the most common response was "Why?" But that was back when oil was thirty-something a barrel, but as it started to catapult, and as global warming became more of an issue, and as carbon cap and trade systems were established in Europe, the Kyoto Protocol… all of those things created - I hate to use the trite phrase, but it was a perfect storm. Finally the forces started to come together to create an environment where at least the more progressive people, thinking ahead, started to think "maybe there's something here, maybe there is a real business opportunity." Part of that is because the business opportunity was demonstrated as a consequence in other countries, as a consequence of their subsidy programs for solar. It started in Japan in the late 90s. Then it followed in the early 90s. I think what investors saw was that, while the cost of solar was subsidized, there was a dramatic huge increase in demand. Between '97 and 2006, the rate of increase of global demand for solar increased every year. In other words, the RATE of increase increased. Historically it was 17%-18% a year back in the 70s and 80s. When it started to go up in the 90s, it was 25%, the 28%, and 32%... and then in 2006 it was over 50% annual increase. I think that was not sustained in 2007, because of a resource shortage in polysilicon. When financial investors recognized that the cost of solar was not going down, but the demand was going up because the effective cost to consumers was going down, because of the subsidy programs. It gave them the data and the understanding that there was this huge price elasticity in demand, and frankly it generated the data requisite to quantify that, and allow investments to say "Wait, there's a huge investment opportunity here" - because right now solar is a fraction of 1% of all electricity generated. That global market for generation is hundreds of billions of dollars a year. A large fraction of that growing number of demand for a total amount of electricity consumed, and amount of money spent on electricity, could be captured by solar. So it was recognized as a huge growth opportunity, the sort of thing venture capitalists like to invest in. That's dues to the effect of subsidy programs, in my opinion. Because of those subsidy programs in Japan, Japan then dominated the market, and then when Germany created their subsidy programs, Germany now dominates the market. I mean, the manufacturers in those countries, and now the largest manufacturer in the world is Sharp.

Jon Lebkowsky: There's a message in there.

BJ Stanbery: There is a message in there. It's economic development. It's develop your industrial base, and become part of this next generation industry. That's one of the things that's achieved by investing in market growth through a subsidy program for a fledgling industry. This is, in my opinion, proven, and when you look at the overall returns, in terms of jobs that are created and wealth that's created, it's a smart investment.

Jon Lebkowsky: You're wanting to create building-integrated photovoltaics. In doing that, are you having to work with the building industry to develop methodologies for including photovoltaics in construction?

BJ Stanbery: Yes, very much so.
Jon Lebkowsky: How is that going? Are they very receptive?

BJ Stanbery: The building and construction materials industry, and the building industry in general is huge, a multi-trillion dollar industry globally, and it tends to be highly regionalized. It has lots and lots of players, so it's not like, for example, the nuclear power plant industry, where there are about three companies in the world that make nuclear power plants. It creates a real challenge from a business development point of view. The other thing about that industry is that it's a very mature industry, so I think the answer is that it's very complex. There are players in that industry that recognize the opportunity to incorporate technology in order to make themselves more competitive in the market, and there are others that just aren't that aggressive.

Jon Lebkowsky: More conservative.

BJ Stanbery: Yes, and they're just not that interested. They don't recognize any threat to their existing business, and they're not that ambitious about growing it significantly.

Jon Lebkowsky: But it seems to me that building is going to be transformed radically. Energy will be part of it, but also methods of construction, and new flexibility in construction. Flexible homes that you can build and extend.

BJ Stanbery: Building tends to be a bit of a craft industry in many ways, potentially the home building part of it. From a cost point of view, there's an existing drive that will only expand to increase the level of preconstruction, manufacturing of components and subsystems for buildings, which will make them more flexible in terms of using standard, modular type components for the construction. That doesn't have to imply boring architecture, in my opinion. It implies, rather, standard building blocks. So I think the combination of that trend, combined with sustainability, because the impact that we have on our natural resources as the rest of the globe expands, in terms of forestry and things like that is just devastating and unsustainable.

Jon Lebkowsky: Building zero-impact homes is really complex.

BJ Stanbery: Yes, it's very complex, but I think you're going to see more and more of a motion toward that, and that will include energy efficiency, energy conservation, and onsite energy generation, particularly by solar.

Jon Lebkowsky: One final, quick question - how close are you to actual production, and seeing your photovoltaic product moving to consumers, and into homes?

BJ Stanbery: Well, we'll be building full-scale prototypes, so I'll get to see it this year. But they won't be on homes until next year. We'll be doing some outside testing and deployment in certain locations, just for testing and pilot purposes this year, and next year you'll see that product flow into the market. And over the next few years, I think you'll see a huge explosion of installations of our technology into homes, hopefully around Texas, and the rest of the world.

Worldchanging Interview: B.J. Stanbery of HelioVolt is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 5:23 PM)

Ethanol: A 20th Century Solution

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:15:14 +0000

This article was written by Alan AtKisson in February 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

My ethanol car is not looking so good these days. I don't mean the scratch on the right rear bumper, caused by a nice lady who was distracted by her kids while backing out of her parking place last Saturday. I mean, of course, the carbon dioxide emissions coming from the tailpipe, and even the ethanol itself.

Back in 2002, when my wife and I bought one of the early "Flexifuel" cars in Sweden, I felt very good about myself. A Flexifuel can be driven on 85% bioethanol mixed with ordinary petrol (that's why it's called "E85"). New to Sweden, I also believed the sales person when he informed me that most of the ethanol in this country came from forest byproducts. Using E85 resulted in about 70% lower carbon dioxide emissions compared to a normal petrol car, he said. My global warming-conscience was relatively clean.

Owning an ethanol car was an adventure in those days. There were only eight ethanol filling stations in Stockholm, and we planned our driving to make sure we passed one regularly. Sure, you can also tank up a Flexifuel car with ordinary petrol; that's what "Flexi" means. But the whole point was not to use fossil fuels. Biofuels were the path to a clean energy future.

Comfortable in my self-congratulatory beliefs, and shielded by my imperfect command of Swedish, it took me a couple of years to notice the growing chorus of debate in Sweden about importing Brazilian ethanol made from sugar cane. Brazil is where more than 80% of our ethanol actually comes from; most of the rest comes from Swedish grain, some comes from European wine-making by-products, and a tiny bit comes from one Swedish forestry waste facility. As though coming out of a fog, I finally realized that this Brazilian ethanol, mixed with a little home-grown agro-industry, was actually fueling my own car — not the pristine Swedish forests of my imagination.

For the next few years, I clung to the notion that our car's carbon emissions and overall environmental impact were much lower than an ordinary car. Brazilian sugar plantations, I read, did not directly impact the Amazon rainforest, the way soya farming or meat-production did. And Brazil had been producing large amounts of ethanol for decades. The economics, lifecycle analysis, and energy balance still looked pretty good. Overall, my carbon dioxide emissions were still probably 30-40% lower than petrol, some figured, even after factoring in the inputs to grow the sugar cane, and the tanker transport to Sweden.

Meanwhile, the rest of Sweden, and the world, had woken up to the wonders of biofuels. Sales of bioethanol and biodiesel was rising dramatically everywhere, driven by government policies and subsidies. George Bush plugged it in his 2007 State of the Union address. The European Commission set goals of powering the union with 10% biofuels by 2020. Here in Sweden, sales of Flexifuel cars like mine (as well as other "enviro-cars" like the Toyota Prius) were skyrocketing, thanks to a generous government rebate, free parking in some cities, and the knowledge that one could drive by the toll cameras around Stockholm and not have to pay the twenty Swedish kronor that all those "normal" cars were going to have to pay at rush hour.

On 24 February 2008, the flight of a Virgin Atlantic jumbo jet from London to Amsterdam, powered for the first time by 25% biofuel, should have been a moment of celebration, a moment when the world could say, "biofuels have arrived." Instead, it served to underscore how far, and how quickly, biofuels' stock has dropped.

Earlier this year, two important scientific studies were published that pulled the rug out from under the biofuels movement, and market. First, a Swiss government study (Zah, et al.) determined that biofuels were worse than fossil fuels in terms of total environmental impact, because cultivation of biofuels was driving the destruction of natural ecosystems for agriculture. Even my Brazilian sugarcane ethanol, according to this assessment, was directly to blame for destroying natural systems. Rising demand for ethanol generally was also causing major indirect, but even worse, destruction. For example, US farmers have been switching from soy to corn, for which they get special biofuel subsidies as well as increasingly high prices. Then Brazilian farmers cut down rainforest to meet the increased demand for Brazilian soy. I stared at the graphs for a long time, but there it was, in hard-to-deny numbers: overall, my ethanol car was hurting the environment, much more than I had previously known, and more than my neighbors' "normal" cars, on which I had been looking with such negative judgment.

Well, there is still global warming to consider, I thought. But before I could even formulate my final defense very well -- "Perhaps addressing global warming is so important that we have to accept some environmental trade-offs when using ethanol" -- a study published by the prestigious journal Science became the second nail in the coffin of my good climate conscience. It turns out that Brazilian ethanol, while not causing Amazon rainforest clearing directly, was certainly causing grassland conversion. And the destruction of Brazil's native Cerrados -- or of any other natural system -- to produce new sugar cane releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so much so that it would take 17 years to repay the resulting "carbon debt." That is, cars using the ethanol from those sugar cane fields, instead of ordinary fossil fuels, would only start realizing a net savings on greenhouse gas emissions after those cars had been driving around for seventeen years.

I've had my ethanol for six years now. That means I only have to drive it for eleven years more before I actually start reducing my greenhouse gas emissions, compared to what they would have been if I had chosen a car with an ordinary petrol engine.

Of course, many other ecosystems are being cleared to produce biofuel crops. Compared to some of these other sources of biofuel, my Brazilian sugar cane does not look so bad. Biofuels from palm oil plantations in southeast Asia (a source of biodiesel, as well as the source for the experimental fuel in the Virgin Atlantic biofuels jet), have a 420-year payback time on their suddenly awful-looking greenhouse gas account. I doubt my environmentalist friends whose cars run on palm-oil biodiesel are sleeping well these days, either. And I doubt they will be driving those cars for 420 years.

These new scientific studies have thrown the already turbulent discussion around biofuels into genuine turmoil. Biofuels have had their critics before, and there have been other warning signs that this bright green path to carbon neutrality was not as clean as it looked. "Biofuels take food from the poor," screamed one recent Swedish headline, and many similar headlines have popped up around the world in recent years. These reflect the reality of what has happened to the energy market, as a result of the growth in biofuels; it has merged with the food market. American gas stations used to advertise "Food and Fuel." Now the question has become — when looking at a field of corn, grain, or sugar cane — food or fuel.

The issue is not merely an abstract economic argument about resource allocation; the issue affects people in daily life, and increasingly, they understand that. Protesters who were recently on the streets of Mexico City were fully aware that the diversion of America's corn crop into ethanol production was driving up the price of tortillas in their city; that was why they were on the streets. And more ominously, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization raised serious alarms at the end of 2007 about a shocking increase in food prices globally — and a sharp decline in the world's reserve stocks of food. They pointed to the growing use of food crops for biofuel production as one of several critical factors that had caused prices to jump.

"Rarely has the world felt such a widespread and commonly shared concern about food price inflation," said the FAO, "a fear which is fuelling debates about the future direction of agricultural commodity prices in importing as well as exporting countries, be they rich or poor." Once again, the world is getting a challenging lesson in systems thinking -- how everything links to everything else. Soaring petroleum prices last year, partly driven by unstable geopolitical conditions and partly by concerns that the world is witnessing the beginnings of so-called "Peak Oil," were an additional driver in the demand for biofuels. So was the world's rising concern for climate change and environmental issues generally. Increased demand for biofuels means increased demand for "sugar, maize, rapeseed, soybean, palm oil and other oilcrops as well as wheat," and the FAO expects demand to continue increasing "for many more years to come."

So by caring about climate change and purchasing ethanol for my car, I might have been — in my micro-economic but nonetheless meaningful way — increasing the economic stress of a poor family somewhere, struggling to put bread on the table, in addition to destroying Brazilian grassland and contributing to global warming.

I confess a genuine puzzlement about what to do regarding my personal energy choices these days; and my personal puzzlement is not so different from the policy puzzlement that world leaders are also starting to feel. Ordinary consumers, increasingly nudged by political and economic signals into buying green-ish cars, are about to become genuinely confused and angry when they discover that their "environmentally friendly cars" have become the target of environmental activist groups. The battle is a real one: Swedish newspapers were recently reporting our government's struggle to get the EU to put lower tariffs on ethanol imports (on which our transport sector is becoming increasingly dependent), just as European environmental groups were lobbying hard to push the EU to raise those tariffs, and to back down from its previous biofuel policy goals. Meanwhile, home-grown Swedish ethanol projects were being abandoned, because the Brazilian imports were already so cheap.

Perhaps it's not such a bad thing that biofuels have been revealed as a much-less-than-optimal energy solution, at least for fueling vehicles. Biofuels for transport have long been seen as a kind of "in-between" step, in any case, with many hoping or expecting that hydrogen fuel cells or electric cars would finally break through, with technologies that could scale up. Maybe the increasingly likely flight from biofuels for transport will accelerate the development of electric cars once and for all. Researchers tell me that electricity is the most efficient solution in pure energetic terms; why spend it on making hydrogen, for example, only to use the hydrogen to make electricity again in a fuel cell? Hence the panting for a truly world-scale conversion to "Plug-in Hybrids" that can run off the electricity grid, and almost never need their reserve combustion motors. I keep waiting for these to come to market, but they always seem to be five-to-ten years away.

Eventually we'll get there, of course ... but that lust for Plug-ins will mean a large increase in demand for electricity, as well. Biofuels are hardly the answer there, at least not at current levels of consumption. No wonder nuclear power is starting to look more attractive again to nations like Finland (currently building a new plant) and the UK (which recently ordered four new nuclear power stations from the French). Sure, nuclear waste is a tremendous problem, one that will be around for thousands of years to come. Sure, nuclear accidents can lay whole regions to waste for millenia, as in Chernobyl. Sure, the mining, refining and shipping of uranium means that it's not really a carbon-free technology. And sure, some nuclear plants are finding it hard to keep running, because the rivers they use to cool their reactors are getting too warm during the increasingly hotter summer months.

But at least these are problems we know about, whereas biofuels are suddenly looking like a jack-in-the-box of unpleasant surprises, ranging from higher food prices to ecosystem destruction to an actual worsening of the greenhouse gas emissions problem. I have been staunchly anti-nuclear for all of my adult life; but even I am beginning to scratch my head and wonder whether shutting down Sweden's nuclear power plants -- which the country originally committed to doing by 2010 -- is such a good idea just now.

These days, my wife and I are researching the electric car options, of course. A car with batteries loaded from our home sockets in Stockholm would theoretically be driven by wind power: we pay a premium to have certified green electricity at home. An electric car would be 100% climate-friendly. But the choice of vehicles is still sadly limited; for some reason, there are better electric car options in Norway, a country that has gotten famously rich selling fossil fuels. And of course, the electrons coming through our wires actually come from a mixture of nuclear power (about half), hydropower, and several other much-smaller sources, including a bit of oil and coal. The actual wind power in the electricity grid here in Sweden is less than one-third of one percent. Biofuels -- which are increasingly our main source of heat in the winter -- also account for ten times the electricity of Swedish windmills. I may like to think we use windpower, and the market may like to pretend that it's selling me windpower; but in reality, an electric car here would be a nuclear-hydropower "hybrid." Still not so bad from a climate perspective; but not exactly a perfect solution either. And I never want to catch myself being duped by wishful thinking again.

Maybe the only real solution to my growing sense of unintentional hypocrisy (I've gone from feeling like a climate hero to eco-criminal, overnight) is to just get rid of the car. I read in the 28 February edition of Newsweek that car sales dropped nearly 7% last year in Japan, and that people are talking about a "post-car society." "Having a car," said a young and trendy internet executive quoted for the article, "is so 20th century."

Ethanol was meant to be a 21st century solution. But these days it, too, seems to be very 20th century as well.

Biofuels: Driving in the Wrong Direction? is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 5:15 PM)

Reducing the Impact of Metals

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:11:04 +0000

This article was written by Alex Steffen in February 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

I'd love some help thinking something through.

Jer's December post Your Stuff: If It Isn't Grown, It Must Be Mined really got me thinking about metals, mining and sustainability (it's an absolutely classic Worldchanging post, if you haven't already read it). I've been contemplating some of the implications.

Industrial activity emits a bit more than 18% of all the CO2 we spew out each year.

About 56% of that pollution, globally, is from metal production.

What can be done to lower that total? Jer runs through many of the current best practices, from recycling metals to better mining techniques. These are all good, but all have some limitations. Ultimately, as Jer says, "our industrial economy will be made up entirely of recycled and biologically grown material."

In the meantime, we need to take steps towards making that possible. I'm interested in the side of the equation that doesn't involve mining or smelting: changes in the way we design, sell and use metal-based products.

There are a whole array of techniques here: dematerialization, product-service systems, producer take-backs and design for disassembly, land-use changes.

Most of them seem to me to boil down to four essential strategies:

1) avoid the creation of the thing in the first place;

2) reduce the need to use the thing on a regular basis, allowing the product to become a service shared by more people and thus reducing the total number made;

3) design the thing to last a long time and be repairable or upgradeable, reducing the need for replacements;

4) design the thing to be as completely recyclable as possible, and require the producer to be responsible for its end-use.

Take the car. The best approach is to design our cities and transportation systems such that people don't have cars at all; the next is to make car-use occasional enough that car-shares can meet people's automotive needs, greatly reducing the number of cars on the road; the next is to manufacture those cars in such a way that they can be easily repaired, maintained and upgraded, greatly extending their lifecycles (hopefully while continuously improving their performance); and the last is to make sure that when that car goes to the junk yard, as much of it as possible ends up in another newly-manufactured car.

So far, so good. But what other post-smelting strategies for reducing the impact of metals might we imagine? What other clever ideas are out there? What timelines are possible, realistic? I'd love your ideas, resources and recommendations.

Bright Green Metal is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 5:11 PM)

Setting a Price on Carbon

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:06:16 +0000

This article was written by Alex Steffen in February 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Climate change is obviously an issue we pay a lot of attention to. But there are so many interesting things to track and write about -- and so much work going on here on our next round of projects -- that sometimes we don't get to some important items.

Carbon pricing is one of those. A lot of the leaders in the green braintrust are focusing their attention on U.S. climate policy, for obvious reasons, and, in particular, on what kind of climate regulations the U.S. ought to adopt under a new Administration with a sympathetic Congress.

All the clear-headed folks seem to be converging on some form of carbon pricing regime. The advantages of setting a price on carbon are real. Pricing carbon at the rates being discussed doesn't even begin to account for all the externalities involved in burning carbon -- the loss of valuable ecosystem services, the ways in which the world is becoming uninsurable, the climate tragedies expected to befall millions of people in coming decades -- but it does start to send price signals which can leverage change all through the system. It's one of those necessary-but-not-sufficient tools.

If you want to understand this stuff, the best place to start is Sightline's Carbon Pricing 101. Then go read Peter Barnes as he explains the options in this brilliant short pamphlet.

Peter argues for a sky trust, a form of "auction-and-rebate" carbon pricing:

The problem is this: If the principle of cap-and-trade is to regulate carbon emissions through the market, giving permits away distorts that market almost as badly as doing nothing toward regulation at all. Permits have value, even if the government doesn’t charge for them. Barnes uses the following analogy in his PowerPoint presentation “A Citizen’s Guide To Carbon Capping”: If the government gave all the World Series tickets to Exxon free, would Exxon let people into the stadium at no charge, or sell tickets at the market price? Give emissions permits to companies, and they’ll either sell them or raise their prices—which is what happened in Europe. “Even if you adopt a pure, liberal, free-market perspective, giving away permits for free is not a good idea,” says Haas.
The alternative—and a fundamental tenet of Barnes’ Sky Trust—is to auction the permits to the highest bidder. As fewer permits are issued each year, the price of permits will rise steeply. Within a few years, the auctions could generate as much as $500 billion annually, says Dorman. That cost will get passed along, of course, and ultimately the consumer will end up paying more for just about everything. Voters don’t like to pay higher prices, which makes legislation like this a hard sell.

But the Sky Trust solves the problem by taking the proceeds from the auction and, basically, cutting everyone a check. And not a small check either. In Barnes’ model, every American would receive a monthly dividend as large as $150—or more than $7,000 a year for a family of four.

For more, go check out Gar Lipow as he compares tax-and-rebate against auction-and-rebate:

With a cap-and-rebate system, it is critical to avoid creation of a large carbon market. This means not only avoiding giving permits away, but keeping secondary markets (where people resell permits they bought at auction) as small as possible.
The reason for minimizing any secondary market is political, but critical. A carbon market produces carbon traders, and carbon traders as a whole tend to oppose reductions in total numbers of permits, whatever honorable individual exceptions might exist. In Europe, carbon traders are lobbying to expand the fraud-ridden Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), weakening additionality requirements, and weakening enforcement of all CDM. Carbon traders are among those lobbying to continue permit giveaways, and oppose auctioning increases.

If we take people like James Hansen seriously and decide we need to phase out 90-percent-plus of fossil fuel use over twenty years, and the remainder over the course of another decade, then avoiding a secondary carbon market becomes even more important. Brokers who buy and sell carbon for a living, holders of big portfolios, offset consultants, certifiers, and providers will all try to find ways to delay such a phaseout. We have enough problems with the existing carbon lobby. There is no reason for global warming opponents to grow our own mini carbon lobby.

Sightline chimes in with an outstanding series of blog posts on climate equity.

One of the things most lacking in this discussion is the global perspective of the U.S. involvement in the emissions and choices of others. But overall, the debate is moving at lightening speed -- and none too quickly.

Cap, Trade, Auction, Rebate: How to Set a Price on Carbon is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 5:06 PM)

Systems that Enable the Future We Want

WorldChanging Team — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:28:39 +0000

This article was written by Alex Steffen in February 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Infrastructure bores us. Most people in the developed world spend a significant portion of their incomes primarily to avoid ever having to think of the infrastructure we use, or the implications of the way we use it. Therefore, we ignore it.

But like most of the ignored products of our minds, infrastructure is about to demand that pay it attention once more. Throughout the developed world, so called infrastructure deficits -- large accumulated backlogs of needed work on existing infrastructural systems, and newer demands for infrastructure that go unmet -- are growing rapidly.

Nowhere is this more true than in the U.S., where a study done last year by the Urban Land Institute, Infrastructure 2007: A Global Perspective, found that we'd have to spend $1.6 trillion dollars to bring our infrastructure up to date.

Now you don't have to agree with ULI's ideas about what up to date means (they're long on totally discredited ideas like new freeway construction and automotive infrastructure) to realize what numbers like that mean: America is falling apart at the seams. Our power grids, our rail system, our roads and bridges, our drinking water and drainage systems, our dams, our ports, our dumps: they're all failing, sometimes in visible catastrophic ways, often in just slow losses of service and usability.

There are three major schools of thought about what to do. The first is the status quo among politicians: do nothing, and hope nothing major happens on our watch. The second is the status quo among many chambers of commerce: rebuild the old systems with updated versions of the old technologies, paying a bonanza to construction and engineering corporations and turning the repaired systems over to private, for-profit utilities. These are both terrible ideas. There is, though, a third way. We might look into this unfolding disaster and see an opportunity for real change.

Most of the infrastructure we use today was designed a century ago: some of it is based on ideas that go back to the Roman Empire. Almost all of it is at best industrial in its thinking. Essentially all of it was designed for a world without climate change, resource scarcity or any proper understanding of the value of ecosystem services. In other words, most of the systems upon which we depend are not only in a state of critical disrepair, they're out-dated and even out of touch with the realities of our century.

As we undertake their repair and replacement, we ought to be thinking like people native to the 21st century. We ought to be imagining systems which aim to provide the end services we want (access, communications, food, water, sanitation) in the most efficient, flexible and sustainable ways possible.

Here are a few things I suspect that means:

1) Adaptive and creative re-use:

We're not going to just junk the nation's entire infrastructural backbone, so we need to figure out how to make the best use of what's there to meet new needs in unexpected ways. Turning abandoned overpasses and rail bridges into parks is one kind of example, as is dedicating whole lanes of arterial roads to bus rapid transit (essentially replicating trains on the cheap, without laying tracks). But I suspect there are whole realms of innovation as yet undiscovered here.

2) Whole-system missions:

These new systems need to take into account their impacts on society and nature as a whole, and not just their effectiveness at providing a particular service divorced from all consequences. For decades, American transportation planners have measured their skill by getting cars from one place to another as quickly as possible, with completely disastrous results. We need to do better this time around. This may need to be reinforced by law.

3) Resilience and survivability:

The one thing we're absolutely sure about for the next century is that things are gonna get weird. The climate will be weird; society will find itself facing new strains (from epidemics to mass-migrations); the kinds of resources and energy available will morph and flex. Our national ability to respond to disasters quickly and comprehensively will be strained even further.

Because of these things, the systems we build need to promote local resilience and survivability even as they promote sustainable prosperity while times are good.

4) Distribution:

One strategy I suspect we need to wrestle with much more seriously is distributed infrastructure. Some ideas, like smart grids, seem to be fairly ready to integrate into our current infrastructure to produce a better hybrid model. Others, like distributed water infrastructure, still seem to need some work. But the model as a whole is a powerful one, and one we need to bring more directly into this conversation.

5) Wild ideas:

We need big new thinking to change the spectrum of the debate. One recent example: networked hydrology.

As ally Geoff Manaugh explains he architecture firm IwamotoScott offered up this idea for the History Channel's city of the future contest:

The project reimagines the entire San Francisco peninsula in the year 2108 A.D., having been overlain, if not completely replaced by, a kind of prosthetic hydrological landscape – complete with underground rivers of algae which will be cultivated as a source of hydrogen for fuel. Architecturally speaking, the city will sprout a whole series of new structures, including multi-angled fog harvesting machines, tendril-like towers along the waterfront, subterranean transport tunnels, and biologically active reservoirs buried beneath the streets.

Go check it out for yourself. It's weird and science-fictional and in many ways insanely impractical, and yet it's also new and bold and in other ways far more engaged with 21st century problems in a realistic way than most of the infrastructure plans coming off the desks of state bureaucrats today. We need thinking like this to expand our sense of the possible.

We are just at the start of this discussion, but we can't have it fast enough. The next American administration is likely going to be forced to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure. That infrastructure will impact the whole world, both directly through its environmental impacts, and indirectly as models and market signals to developing world megacities. We need to make sure that the systems we end up with in 2030 actually enable the future we want, not rebuild the past.

Infrastructure for the Future We Want is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:28 AM)

Re-Shirt: Reimaging the Cotton T

WorldChanging Team — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:19:27 +0000

This article was written by Sanjay Khanna in February 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

By Sanjay Khanna

On a summer day, walk down a typical street in almost any city in the world and you’ll observe that cotton T-shirts and personal expression are synonymous.

T-shirts capture people’s views about almost anything—from their hopes for a better world, to their favorite bands…to their desire to, um, ride an iconic American motorcycle across the United States (more on this later).

Yet even the humble cotton T-shirt has a backstory.

In Big Cotton: How A Humble Fiber Created Fortunes, Wrecked Civilizations and Put America on the Map, author Stephen Yafa chronicles cotton’s hidden history and thus a key part of the cotton T-shirt’s backstory as well.

Yafa remarks that in the twentieth century “cotton crops became one of the world’s heaviest and most persistent users of toxic pesticides, creating lethal environmental and health hazards that continue to plague many countries.”

The desertification of the Aral Sea in Central Asia, one of the planet’s foremost ecological catastrophes, is linked directly to cotton cultivation.

According to Yafa, the demise of the world’s fourth largest inland sea was an “ecological disaster of epic proportions…where the rivers feeding the Aral Sea…were diverted to provide [cotton] crop irrigation and in the process brought human misery and massive destruction of flora and fauna to a vast populated area.”

Enter Re-Shirt.

Re-Shirt is an early stage, self-funded business concept of Shapeshifters, a global Internet-based platform for cultural creatives headquartered in Vienna, Austria.

Anne Zacsek and Doris Kodym, project leads at Shapeshifters, came up with the idea for Re-Shirt.

They describe Re-Shirt as a way of keeping valuable cotton resources in circulation, providing information related to the cotton backstory and, based on the idea of artifacts embodying historical narrative, adding tangible value and meaning to an existing T-shirt through the intangible value of storytelling.

The Re-Shirt experiment began through thoughtful, old-fashioned research.

Zacsek and Kodym had planned to commission the design and production of a T-shirt to promote another Shapeshifters venture.

While canvassing the global Shapeshifters community for hints on sourcing and printing an order of fair trade, eco-cotton T-shirts—and after interviewing Wolfgang Wimmer, an eco-design professor at the Technical University of Vienna—Zacsek and Kodym learned that the journey of a typical T-shirt is resource intensive indeed.

Some startling facts:

• A full 10 percent of pesticides worldwide are employed in cotton growing
• 10,000 liters of water are used to produce the cotton needed for a single T-shirt
• 20,000 liters of water and 8.3 kilowatt hours of electricity are harnessed in the production of one kilogram of raw cotton fibers
• The average annual cotton consumption per person in Germany is 11 kilograms, which equates 220,000 liters of water usage for the average German individual’s purchases of cotton goods

“Mr. Wimmer explained that keeping existing resources in circulation is always more efficient than creating something new,” says Zacsek. “It inspired Doris and me to think of a way to share the cotton story and bring existing T-shirts to the marketplace in an inspiring way.”

That’s when Re-Shirt—the idea of a T-shirt with a history—was sparked in the minds of Zacsek and Kodym.

Initially, the pair solicited T-shirt donations and the corresponding T-shirt histories from artists and others in Vienna.

“Although people respected our idea of keeping cotton resources in circulation, they needed to know we are trustworthy,” says Zacsek. “People feel attached to their stories and want to make sure we respect the personal history embodied in their T-shirts.”

Next, the Re-Shirt team washed the T-shirts and silk-screened them with a square, bright orange Re-Shirt logo that incorporates a white rectangular patch for the T-shirt’s alphanumeric code.

This code is important; it contains the passport to the Re-Shirt’s individual history and is written onto each T-shirt by the Re-Shirt co-creators.

As an example, the Re-Shirt I’m wearing is a T-shirt from Boston, Massachusetts, emblazoned with the Harley-Davidson logo. Its hand-written alphanumeric code is ATA002003107.

If you go to the Re-Shirt home page and type in the code, you’ll see the following story contributed by my Re-Shirt’s former owner.

H-D is a great American motorcycle and the love object of many, many age 50+ American men who wished they had spent their lives riding across the U.S. on a Harley instead of sitting in cubicles trying to make money. My 50+ brother gave it to me – say no more.

In just one paragraph, the T-shirt donor has made a potentially anonymous consumer experience personal.

Which means I’m not just wearing a T-shirt.

Turns out I’m also sporting the dry humor of a sibling…as well as sharp insight into the symbolism of an American icon.

Finally, I’ve learned a lot about the backstory of cotton and the importance of finding creative, expressive, innovative ways to keep resources in circulation as long as possible.

Keeping resources circulating may in itself be the most crucial message of Zacsek and Kodym’s Re-Shirt endeavor, which cannot enjoy complete success unless people from around the world continue to be motivated to donate T-shirts to the project, while sharing a tiny bit of themselves and their culture via their T-shirt’s intimate histories.

Ride on.

Note: If you’d like to learn more about donating T-shirts to Re-Shirt to keep cotton resources in circulation and to share stories, go to http://www.re-shirt.net/donate.

Sanjay Khanna is a writer and foresight researcher based in Vancouver, Canada.

Re-Shirt: A New Backstory for the T-shirt is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:19 AM)

Designing with Peak Population in Mind

WorldChanging Team — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:12:11 +0000

This article was written by Alex Steffen in February 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Sometime in the latter half of this century, human population will peak. Having swelled to a bit over nine billion people, our numbers will begin to drop as people age and women worldwide pass through the urban transition, gain control over their own life-choices and have fewer children.

After that, population will proceed to decline by the middle of the 22nd century to a number somewhere between 8.5 billion and 5.6 billion (depending it seems largely on whose assumptions about longevity growth you find most credible).

That's pretty much the consensus position among demographers (though there is a range of belief about when the peak will happen and whether we can expect to more or less plateau at 8.5 billion or experience a long bumpy slope to a stable-state population of about 6 billion). Note that we don't need to assume any sort of apocalypse here: this is the orderly progression of human beings passing through a post-industrial demographic threshold you can already see in cultures from Japan to Italy to Finland.

Note, too, that the major difference, if I'm reading the studies right, between a 22nd century with 8.5 billion people and one with 6 billion is the number of old people. We live now on a planet of children and youth, with a world median age (in 2000) of about 26. By 2100 it will be 44 years, if U.N. demographers (PDF) are correct. If that median age continues to rise because life expectancies continue to rise, we'll end up with a flatter global population including a lot of people who are by today's standards extremely old; if the growth in life expectancy levels off, we'll see a gradual decline in population (and I suppose it is even possible that radical life-extension could mean that population continues to grow... which could have very grave consequences).

But let us, for the sake of argument, take a middle ground position. Let us assume that human population peaks about 2070, that we experience modest but constant life-expectancy gains and low fertility rates, and we end up with, say, a little over 7 billion people sharing the planet by the middle of next century. Why does this matter?

We'd have two essential tasks here: the first is a well-understood challenge of seeing humanity to that peak with the least possible permanent damage to the planet and vital human institutions -- essentially, building a bright green future 9 billion people can share; the second is one I don't think I've heard any discussion of, which is planning that bright green future with the different needs in mind of the shrinking, aging population to follow.

We might think of this a two-stage process: working to see a young humanity safely through the shoals of this century while preparing the groundwork for a more mature humanity to live happily in the centuries to come.

How we design our answers to the immediate crisis will have, it seems to me, much to do with the conditions faced by our great-great grandchildren in the next couple centuries. Just as we're learning that the Great Wager is a one-time shot (that we only have enough resources and biocapacity to build this new civilization once, so we'd better get it right the first time), barring some magical technological breakthrough (and pinning our hopes on that seems a bad bet for reasons we'll pick up another time) those to follow after probably will have, to some large extent, work within a tighter set of ecological limits and with the already-embedded energy and resources of the civilization we design this century. It seems to me extremely unlikely, in other words, that humanity in the 22nd century will be in a position to toss it all and start over (instead, their frontier may be the ruins of the unsustainable aspects of the world we're building today, their resource base our dumps and disaster zones).

Thinking about this reality might, I suppose, bum out some folks who place their faith in a future human transcendence of natural limits and human shortcomings. If you can't imagine any worth in a future that lacks free energy, nan-fabs, super-intelligent AI and immortal people, the 22nd century as it may well shape up might seem pretty lame. But this is stale thinking in my opinion, Industrial Age ideas of the linear progress of our ability to conquer nature, the future projected as a replay of the past, with no limits.

But limits are reality. We live on a finite planet, one whose workings we understand only poorly. Everything else is very far away. And by the time the people of the 22nd century get their turn, the Earth will be a much smaller place, in terms of ecological utility, than it is today.

The standard response to these facts is that some new technology will "save" us, and make limits irrelevant. But I am consistently impressed, when I speak with folks who are hard at work in the fields of biotechnology, molecular engineering and software design, at how real a sense of limits actually exists among the smarter ones. There are things we don't know how to do now and may never (in any foreseeable time span) know how to do; there are others that seem like good ideas until you start doing them and encounter the unintended consequences; there are still others that work, but work in ways that mean something different than we expected. Where in the 90s we expected emerging technologies to unleash the boundless, more contemporary thinking about these technologies seems to me to be all about seeing them not as magic but as tools: profoundly useful, if used right, but perhaps far less transformative than once we hoped. They may greatly extend the range of actions we can take within the fundamental limits we face, but they most likely won't change the limits themselves.

Given that, I've been thinking, that we might begin to imagine our responsibilities in a slightly different light. It seems to me we might imagine a series of nested challenges:

1) The meeting of the immediate crisis. Before global population peaks, we need to have one-planet models of prosperity, and we need to make sure people embrace them (and have the opportunity to embrace them), so that we head off the disaster-spirals that await us if we continue to overshoot the Earth's biological capacity. The meeting of this crisis allows us to imagine stability returning in the 22nd century, and is vital.

2) The preservation of long-term legacies: the maximum possible number of species, the most stable climate possible and as many of the great human legacies -- from languages to learnings, seeds to world heritage sites -- as we can. The preservation of these legacies expands choice for future generation, and is vital.

3) The design of answers to 1) and 2) that themselves think ahead. We will be designing, for instance, cities to house billions more people over the next 50 years... but then most of those cities will become shrinking cities, home to far fewer people in the next century: can we design cities that can shrink gracefully?

Can we imagine designing all our buildings and infrastructure for eventual disassembly, reuse or recycling, so that the no-longer needed urban fabric of these shrinking cities becomes not waste material but the resource feedstock of the cities of the future? Can we imagine, now, designing loops and closed systems which will leave our great-great grandchildren not with the vast toxic legacy of corrupted waste we are currently amassing, but with healthy, useful stockpiles of materials which we have used, enjoyed and then left for re-use?

Can we plan beyond the peak? If we spent even 1% of our money and effort to plan into our systems and designs more of the needs of people 150 years from now, we might find that the pay-off to future humanity could be really vast.

----

Well, re-reading this, I'm not sure I've arrived at the points I most wished to make. Somewhere in my mind is a larger point about the nature of sustainable design, and how we ought to be working as hard as we can to imagine our current stock of resources as the only stock of resources -- the stock of resources to which future generations of our children will be largely limited -- and to work a bit harder at building our cities and systems to have the flexibility of re-use, disassembly, etc. that will allow future generations to re-make their world out of the pieces of our own.

Furthermore, I suspect, without an entirely coherent argument to back myself up, that thinking about our work in this way might actually greatly accelerate sustainable prosperity in our own day, that pairing flexibility and one-planet limits may be part of what lets us reimagine the good life along radical new lines that fix the future we're passing on while making our own stay on the planet as bright as possible.

But I don't really have the words yet. Perhaps others have ideas along these lines?

What are the Sustainability Implications of Peak Population? is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:12 AM)

Home Delivery and the Bright Green Urban Experience

WorldChanging Team — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:00:59 +0000

This article was written by Alex Steffen in February 2008. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Most North Americans think of shopping and driving as fundamentally paired activities. After five decades of mall culture and ever-increasing big-box domination, we're grown totally accustomed to the idea that shopping works like this:

1. You get in your car.

2. You drive to a big building full of stuff.

3. You buy things and put them in your car.

4. You repeat steps 2 and 3 until your car is full or you have everything you want.

5. You drive home and unload your new stuff.

6. You complain about the lack of closet space in your home.

But what if this archetypal 20th century shopping experience is about to become a thing of the past?

I'm really intrigued by NAU's new retail model, where you go in, try clothes on, check out their look and feel, and then order them for delivery to your home (you can buy them and carry them home yourself, but you pay a premium). The main advantage for you is that you don't have to schlep (meaning you don't need to be driving to shop there); the main advantages for NAU are that they can carry more items in a smaller space (because they don't need to stock multiples of every item in each color and size) and distributing clothes through a central warehouse is more efficient. The storefront, in effect, becomes a "webfront" -- a physical trial space for online shopping.

There are a whole slew of new companies that will deliver organic food to your door, based on your online orders. There are even some CSAs that will skip the annoying step of making you come to a central location and just drop the groceries at your door. I've been told that some farmer's markets are offering free same-day delivery for the food you buy. All of these services hint at being able to be in direct relationship with your food, perhaps even your local farmer, without having to drive to do it.

(One great idea to make all this easier is the shop & drop -- "a password-protected area built into a house or garden, much like the coal-bunkers of yore, where groceries or any products bought online can be left securely, meaning you don't have to be in when they arrive.")

Is it greener to shop on foot or online and then have the stuff delivered? Well, surprisingly (at least to me) the answer is generally yes. Sometimes it's much greener.

The ecological cost of driving a number of online purchases in one truck (a truck, I might note, that is increasingly likely to itself be more efficient than some US cars) on a pre-set route (programmed to also be highly-efficient) is a small fraction of the ecological cost of driving to and from the store to get them yourself. Even when shopping in person, if not having to drag your loot home means you can get to the shop without driving, delivery is still more efficient, I'm told.

And, of course, more and more people are putting a premium on the experience of community shopping. Think about the exploding number of farmer's markets. Think about the newly resurgent neighborhood main streets in upscale compact neighborhoods. People like walking around in their neighborhoods and buying things from people with whom they have a connection.

In addition, just as product-service systems can mitigate the need (or perceived need) to own various bulky tools, appliances, even cars, home delivery might allow for a more just-in-time model of home provisioning. After all, those 900-roll plastic-wrapped palettes of toilet paper from Costco take up a ton of space -- and the 898 rolls we're not using offer us few benefits while they clutter our closets. If we could outsource the storage of extra TP to a home delivery service, living in a smaller space would be that much easier.

Home delivery feels to me like an important piece of the bright green urban experience. Compact communities, good communications technologies and high-value experiences supporting more efficient systems, more potential connection to the backstories of the things you're buying -- it seems to all offer some interesting leverage points to me.

What do you think?

Home Delivery as a Sustainability Lever is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:00 AM)